The Collapse of Stormwind
by Ihsan997
Summary: Far in Azeroth's future, civilization has gone from medieval to worse. In a world of dark aged dystopia, a bounty hunter is hired to remove a usurper dynasty in Stormwind. With a naive young apprentice under her wing, will she really fulfill a contract she knows will sow the seeds of chaos in the world? Set roughly two centuries after current in-game events; very AU. 10 chapters
1. Chapter 1

**A/N: hello, readers! Welcome to volume five of seven in a thread I like to call the Saga of Sharimara. Like all other stories in the series, you DO NOT need to read my other stories in order to understand this one. All context is given in the narrative itself and the paragraph below. Of course, I would like it if you read my other stories too, but I won't force you to do so.**

**This story takes place in the year 265 on the Warcraft timeline - for reference, the WoD expansion was in the year 31. This is Azeroth well over two centuries in the future, where the events of the current games are just blips in the history books. It's still the Warcraft world, but far ahead of current lore. Enjoy!**

"Historic my ass," Sharimara mumbled as she nursed her mug of cider. Brooding at a table tucked back in the absolute furthest corner from the front door she'd finally found a vantage point from which she could observe everyone in the tavern without being noticed herself.

And she didn't like it.

The Lion's Pride Inn was supposed to be some sort of legacy bar and motel. Even during her childhood long ago, she remembered hearing about it; Goldshire had always been famous for bouts of mass hysteria and the strange behavior displayed by locals and travelers alike. Despite its wild reputation, she found it rather demure compared to some of the bars she'd been to in more remote locations. Of course, is was only an hour or so after the moon had set and dawn had broken, but it was also the last day of the work week; the environment should have been a little more wild given the reputation of the place.

Motionless and observant, Sharimara examined each table in the packed tavern. There was no doubt that the establishment was crowded beyond the capacity legally set by local fire safety chief, but it wasn't likely that anybody cared. Not during a world afflicted by so many slow burning, non critical social problems. Tables were positioned almost wall to wall, and some of the, were occupied by seven or even eight patrons. Over an hour, she even saw three separate people get pickpocketed successfully. A fourth incident occurred, though the thief was caught, stabbed and left on the floor for a good ten minutes before a cook came out from the back, dragged the corpse out the front door and then returned to work without washing his hands. In other words, nothing out of the ordinary occurred.

Wearing a long blouse and the baggy pants common to the rural human women of Elwyn Forest, Sharimara had done her best to fit in. Being half Kaldorei and half Darkspear, she was rather conspicuous - tall even by the standards of full blooded jungle troll women, and bearing the glowing green eyes of a night elf warden rather than the standard silver. Not that silver eyes would have been any less conspicuous - there were hardly any elves of any variety at all in the region those days.

A human male slumped in the opposite corner slowly woke up, feeling a lump on his forehead as he rose from a lying down position. He'd gotten a bit too friendly with Sharimara earlier when talking about her dress, and nobody moved to help him when she unceremoniously tossed him in the corner. Slinking out of the bar, he was only one in a string of odd occupants that day. And just as Sharimara's impatience was growing, a new person entered the tavern. A tall human looking woman that was certainly odd enough.

Definitely young, the woman wore mostly black, including the travel bag she had slung over her shoulder. Only a checkered grey and black scarf wrapped around her neck appeared to contrast to her clothes and hair. Well, that and her skin, which was a sort of light caramel color. Walking slowly with her eyes darting around, the young woman carried herself with a sort of air of confidence that was broadcast across the room. A few people took notice as she walked by, looking up at her in an air of respect for a person they didn't even know. She was elegant, well dressed and purposeful in her gait.

Sharimara facepalmed, already sighing at how conspicuous the partner she'd been assigned was.

In spite of her moderate success in making herself invisible over in the corner of the room, the black clad woman quickly noticed her and began to stride over smugly. Every rookie mistake was being paraded in front of her - the trendy clothes with a gothic flare, the obvious bulge of a dirk strapped to the inside of her thigh, those congenially downcast eyes that scanned the room a few times too many...Sharimara cringed. It was as if the young woman wished to scream 'look at me, I'm dangerous' from the rooftops and then think she could just slip into the shadows thereafter.

Eyes trained down and attention focused on her mug, Sharimara waited patiently for her supposed partner in crime to take a seat. The woman leaned too far back and even draped one arm over the back of the chair, and not pinching the bridge of her nose consumed about half of her patience right then and there. When she just continued to drink, the rookie she'd been stuck with tried to start the conversation by grandstanding.

"So...I take it you just came off of a job that required you to pose as a farmer's wife?" the young woman asked, a pretentious sound of mock coolness in her voice.

"No. Nothing of the sort." Though the cider was non alcoholic, Sharimara took a long si from it anyway in an attempt to help alleviate her irritation. "Okay, you need to stop sitting like you're the owner of this tavern and start sitting however the next few people at the tables adjacent to your chair are sitting."

Though there wasn't spite in Sharimara's voice so much as impatience, the young woman dropped the whole rebel without a cause act rather quickly and straightened up. "Oh, blending in with the plebeians, I see? That's a great idea, actually."

That's not an idea, that's the most basic form of stealth, the biracial woman in disguise thought to herself. "Uh…right. And now that you're here, we need to get down to business - the less time we spend here, the better."

"I most definitely concur," the young woman answered, her movements reeking of fakeness. Many long decades spent in this line of work had taught Sharimara to be objective and ignore personal sentiment about any partners she was assigned to accompany, though the fact that the woman in black was trying too hard to impress her felt as flattering as it was annoying (which was wasn't that much in either case, but still). "And I just wanted to say, I'm thankful to have been partnered with someone like you. I've read up on the wardens of your people – you work on the inside of the system, and you know how to sabotage it as well. It's awesome."

Shifting much more slowly, Sharimara's eyes swept the room in a movement that even the woman right in front of her didn't notice. A few of the men checked the two of them out, but then again, everybody was giving everybody else those sort of looks in the tavern even at such an early hour. None of those looks seemed suspicious enough, though a person hired to do the dirty work of others could never be too cautious.

"Well…wardens of half my roots, at least," Sharimara replied in a low voice, still scanning as they made small talk to see if anyone was trying to listen in. The young woman cocked her head to the side as if she was about to ask another question, but was stopped by the raising of the warden's violet-blue hand. "Let's keep it to a minimum. As I was informed, this is just a meeting arranged so we can move on from here; let's make arrangements and be done with it."

Humbled at first, the young woman quickly let the polite refusal of her next question roll off her. Spunky, this one. "I understand…I'm sorry, I'm just nervous. This is my first quest abroad, and it can help our reputations…we can never trust other people in this business, you know," the young woman said to another person in this business as if they knew each other. "And I can't believe we're actually going to assassinate the king-"

The woman stopped short when she noticed Sharimara curl her upper lip enough to a nearly inaudible pop of pressure to escape her mouth. "No names. Not for the job, not for our contacts, not for who our employers are rumored to be."

Humbled once again and visibly deflated in the mood, the young woman's caramel skin darkened in slight embarrassment. "You're right…you're right. I guess whoever the group is that contacted us, they want absolute secrecy. These are serious people."

At that, Sharimara found it difficult to conceal her contempt for the naiveté. "They're fools like everyone else involved with the unrest in Elwyn," the warden whispered, forcing the woman to tilt her head with her ear facing forward. "Just more cogs in the machine no more deserving of respect than the rest, but questioning them isn't part of the job. We were contacted; we obey the rules. But don't let yourself believe that they're any less petty than all the others."

Fascination flickered across the young woman's features as the mention of current events. "Well, I know the different factions vying for power are all greedmongers, especially the New-" She stopped herself from using another name of the actors involved even without Sharimara needed to sneer at her again, and quickly corrected her language to something more general. "Especially that faction trying to revive the Alliance. They're chasing a dream."

Sharimara inspected the young woman hard. She'd obviously done her research and was well read; probably a result of the rashness of youth. Regardless, such loose lips weren't particularly helpful, especially at a time so tumultuous that bread riots and secret arrests had become commonplace in Elwyn Forest, Westfall and Redridge, the only remnants of a once powerful faction. Seeking a means to shut the topic down fast, the warden launched into a monologue she truthfully expected she wouldn't even need to explain out loud.

"Everybody chases dreams; that's how politics works. Dictators rise and fall, leaving pointless and forgettable marks on the history books. Letting oneself believe that any group involved has somehow risen above the cycle, including the ones paying us, means to get swept up with the rabble." Shaking her head in a signal that the talk wouldn't lead them anywhere, Sharimara leaned forward again, almost smirking when the awestruck rookie mimicked her actions. "Now…this isn't the time or the place to go over the details. We're here because our employers wanted us to meet; the rest of the plan is up to us to devise. Do you have the tools you need?"

Eyes lit up and saucer like, the young woman grinned, flashing a set of perfect white teeth with prominent lower canines. "Do I ever!" she exclaimed, though in a low voice. "I've got…well, I've got the right stuff." This time, she cut her words short due to her own judgment rather than any prompting from Sharimara, causing the warden to hum in approval. This one learned fast.

"Good. And you know about the portal in the basement here?"

"Yes. It can take us to Stormwind instantly, saving us a half a day of travel. All we have to do is bully our way down there. But…how can we both go through without causing anyone to become suspicious?"

Smiling to herself, Sharimara prepared to open the most important part of the conversation. "This is how it will go…you take that portal downstairs," she began by explaining, "and I'll take an alternative route."

"A route you're not going to mention?"

"Good girl. We're going to meet at the roof of the book depository three blocks down from the Stormwind opera house in six hours. Our employers don't know that; that's the plan we're here to devise, unassisted and unknown. Are there any objections to the time and the place?"

"No, not from me at all," she young woman beamed quietly, grinning with delight as their efforts officially started. "I'll make sure not to ask the locals too many questions when searching for it, and…uh…I'll find it," she mumbled, cutting her own speech short again.

"Excellent. We need to scout the area before doing anything else, since the opera is taking place tomorrow night – we don't have much time. Security will be high even from today in order to keep the commoners out of the upper class district, especially when the head of state will leave his ivory tower to make a rare appearance there. So that building is probably as close as we can get without running into trouble, for the time being at least."

"Have you been to Stormwind before?" the woman in black asked, temporarily losing focus of the matter at hand.

"Wha…yes, a few times, but the last time was maybe half a century ago," she replied, immediately regretting having indulged the young woman's curiosity when those two hazel eyes widened again. "Focus."

"Right, sorry. I'm Blanca by the way." Sharimara licked the inside of her lips, trying to discern if this was the type of person who would become hyperactive when under pressure or not. "What? We need to know each other's aliases, right? If it helps, Blanca isn't my real name."

"I know that Blanca isn't your real name because that's part of why you were hired; you're distantly related to nobility, though far removed since you're from a very faraway place," Sharimara replied, giving Blanca what appeared to be the shock of her life. "Don't worry; I was not informed of exactly what place you're from, nor was I informed of your real family name. But your partner will need to know that your true family name can grant you access to the upper class districts, and thus the opera house. You didn't consider that before?"

Blanca blinked a few times, expending a few seconds to regain her composure. "Yes, I mean, of course I did…I just didn't...I did, but it's just eerie to hear someone else in this profession talk about it."

"Just of the fact that you're using an alias; not your real name, specifically. Now focus; where are we meeting?"

Settling down again and relaxing in the face of an easy question, Blanca finally started to blend in with the crowd despite her 'twentysomething goth girl stuck in her teenage years' type of outfit. "On top of the Stormwind book depository in six hours," she replied quietly.

"Excellent. What are we going to do?"

"Scout the area, I'm assuming for possible entrances and exits, and ways the plan could go wrong."

"And from there?"

Blanca paused, then grinned when she realized that it was a trick question. "Well, I guess we haven't discussed that yet, but it would be prudent to set up shop in a cheap motel in another part of the city. Probably the poor quarter where the city guards are too afraid to go because of all the protests and unrest."

Satisfaction swelled up inside of Sharimara; this pairing wasn't going to be a mistake after all. "Now you're talking…those sort of places have likely shifted in the past fifty years, so I can't exactly predict which one we can rent a room in…but we can figure all of that out once we're inside the city."

"But you're forgetting one thing," Blanca whispered with an almost cheeky grin.

Raising one of her medium length eyebrows, Sharimara tried to guess what sort of joke the young woman in black was trying to make. When Blanca actually waggled her own eyebrows humorously, and when the warden narrowly avoided stepping on the young woman's foot beneath the table, the aim dawned on her. "Sharimara," she murmured in a voice that was almost too quiet for the human looking but obviously mixed young woman to hear.

"Good. That's good to know, Shari." Scooting her chair back a bit, Blanca at least had the wherewithal to know that their introductory meeting didn't need to extend beyond the few minutes it already had there in the tavern. "Six hours and I'll be there. By the way, it's probably a good idea to linger here for a while after I leave."

Furrowing her brows in offense at the dictation from a rookie, Sharimara almost lost her composure for the first time in many decades. "Yes. Sounds like a stupendous idea," she muttered in response, then promptly returned to nursing her cider.

Swaying her hips slightly with that smug confidence again, Blanca made her way back out the front door of the tavern in a manner she probably thought was subtle yet dangerous in appearance to the most discerning eyes. She failed to remember, of course, that she was dressed to impress in a tavern full of working class boors and that she'd spent just a few minutes sitting there without buying anything at a table in the corner occupied by a green eyed, pointy eared giantess over eight feet tall.

The enthusiasm was there, the intelligence was there, the ingenuity was there, but the young woman was in serious need of some polish if she wanted to pull off assassinating the King of Stormwind.

Shoving her doubts aside, Sharimara resigned herself to trying to train Blanca the best she could in the two days and nights that they would know each other. "Maybe," she murmured while sipping on her cheap cider. "Just maybe."


	2. Chapter 2

Noon was almost upon them judging by the position of the accursed, blinding sun in the cloudy sky above. Perched in an alcove about three stories up, Sharimara had a perfect view of the alleyway between the Stormwind book depository and an old records office for the genealogies of humanity's noble families. It was narrow and cramped as neighborhoods for bureaucratic offices tended to be even in upper class areas, thus providing great cover for her as she wedged herself in the indentation cut into the building just beneath a gargoyle. The street beyond was visible as well (the other side led to a dead end), revealing almost no foot traffic in a part of the higher city that was virtually shut down on the weekends. Though she couldn't quite see the city itself, it was a perfect spot from which to view her immediate surroundings.

As well as the rookie slowly creeping down the alleyway below.

Not even trying to dodge or press herself against the wall, Blanca tiptoed along as she simply walked behind a garbage dumpster. A ridiculously long duffel back was slung over her shoulder, clinking back and forth as she snuck without any sort of plan to hide were a city guard to pass by the alley. She'd at least worn a cloak and cowl of a plain brown color this time, and her hand wraps complemented her running shoes in a way that suggested she could at least handle herself during a chase. But avoiding a chase in the first place was a much better plan. And it was a plan that Sharimara would ensure the young woman wouldn't forget.

Dropping from her alcove, the warden created no noise or even disturbance in the air as she fell three stories to the alleyway below. The rush no longer tickled her inside the way it used to, and a sheer thirty foot drop didn't scare her the way it had when she herself had been a rookie. Perhaps she was judging the young woman too harshly...but then again, harsh lessons were often the most beneficial.

Despite the plate armor she was wearing, Sharimara caused minimal noise when she landed on light feet encased in metal boots. Blanca, however, jumped backward and landed against the aluminum dumpster, winding up in a heap on the ground when the weight of her duffel bag dragged her downward.

"I have rights! I...Shari?" the young assassin in training sputters while trying to regain her senses. Embarrassment quickly took control of her mind, and she pushed her back against the dumpster to rise up. "This isn't a time for games!"

Though the top half of Sharimara's head was covered by her warden's helmet, the bottom half was left exposed, as well as the tight line she pulled her lips into. "Astute. You'd do best to keep that in mind while tiptoeing around like you're engaged in a round of hide and seek."

A sense of hurt, meekness and curiosity worked its way across Blanca's youthful face. "Well, how else am I supposed to move around?" she asked, injecting a hint of defiance in her tone even as she offered Sharimara's extended hand to help stabalize herself.

"In short bursts. Pick hiding spots behind obstacles and inside nooks and alcoves. Whenever you move, ensure that you move fast, unseen and directly to another hiding spot."

Blanca brushed herself off and adjusted her duffel bag, somehow managing to look cute even after having been knocked down in a cramped alleyway. "Duly noted, sage of ages," she sighed in defeat. The young woman eyed the book depository next to them, searching for hidden entrances that weren't there. "So do we need to parkour our way up the sides or just break in through a window?"

Sharimara raised an eyebrow inside her helmet. "Parkour?" she asked suspiciously.

"We just scale the sheer side of this building!" Blanca answered with glee.

Suspicious again, Sharimara looked the young woman over. Blanca's hand wraps and running shoes implied that she was rather athletic, even if her situational awareness wasn't yet as tempered as it should be. She still had yet to prove herself in the warden's eyes, however.

"Alright then...show me what you can do."

Grinning and tightening the baldric that was holding down her duffel bag, Blanca took a moment to inspect the side of the book depository. The whole building was five stories high; there were numerous statues, alcoves and ledges in the way up in the stylized fashion typical of fancier buildings in human cities, but it was still a daunting task. Sharimara positioned herself right behind the young woman lest she fall.

Running and jumping, Blanca latched onto a windowsill at the second floor, clearing a height of which most humans would have been incapable. Her breathing was too heavy and her movements were too tense and strained, causing far too much energy to be expended. But she still scaled the side of the building: step by step, ledge by ledge, Blanca blazed her slow and unrefined but safe and stable trail five stories up. Sharimara leapt up after her, remaining a good distance behind in case she'd have to catch Blanca in midair. She didn't, however; the young woman easily cleared the edge of the roof and pulled herself up, panting and winded but safe and sound.

Once she'd leapt up top, Sharimara reached to help Blanca up and was surprised when the woman flipped up into a standing position. Given more training, she'd probably learn to clear more distance in a shorter amount of time while expending less energy, but all things considered, she'd done a great job.

"You're quite skilled at this," Sharimara told her as the two of them slid over toward the small rooftop shed bearing the access door leading down into the building itself.

Sincere appreciation shone in Blanca's hazel eyes. "Really? I've practiced parkour for more than a decade!" she practically chirped.

"I don't know what that means, but your practice paid off. And it will be needed."

Surveying their surroundings, Sharimara was pleased to find they had an excellent view. The upperclass part of Stormwind was on a plateau at a higher elevation than the bulk of the metropolis, overlooking the city all the way to the port. On the other side lied the opera house, poking up above the art galleries, museums and other cultural facilities the city's nobility and merchant class demanded. The contrast between the upper and lower class parts of the city was the most stark she'd seen in her two hundred and twenty someodd years of life.

Blanca noticed her behavior and mimicked it again. "It's no wonder the people are on the verge of rebellion every other day," she sighed once more. "This entire section of the city is walled off and on a plateu; it's like the rich want to live in heaven on Azeroth and condemn the poor to a squalid hell."

Not wanting to engage the young woman in a political discussion, Sharimara sought to simply defuse Blanca's palpably growing moral outrage. "Every society has rich and poor; the question is how much of a disparity they're willing to accept. And in our case, that disparity and the discontent it creates is the reason why we have jobs. We're exploiting the situation just like the nobles who cram the people into high rent, low quality neighborhoods and offer them one silver a day on average to work in their shops and warehouses."

Unsatisfied but mostly pacified, Blanca silently stewed as she glanced at the nearby rooftops for possible spies or government informants. They were hugging the shed at the top of the roof and huddled up rather well, but it was still only noon, and the overcast sky still allowed an amount of daylight to fall on them. Fortunately, the compound like structure surrounding the upper class plateau granted the rich a sense of security, and personnel of the city guard were few and far between.

Wearing nothing but her plate armor and a small travel rucksack, Sharimara traveled much more lightly. Inside the rucksack, she felt around for a long viewing glass she'd looted from a pirate ship she'd hijacked and turned in at a port in the Badlands the other week. Sliding it to full length, she was able to gain a decent view of the opera house.

"I can see the security now...they're taking protection of that place seriously even a full day ahead of time."

Blanca hummed in affirmation. "I know, right? Look at that one footman standing on the steps leading into the opera house courtyard...he looks rather self important, doesn't he?"

"Huh?" Sharimara asked in surprise.

When Sharimara looked away from her viewing glass, the warden found Blanca with a high powered, gnomish manufactured pair of binoculars that she'd almost certainly lugged in that cumbersome duffel bag of hers. There was a wry smile on her lips that she was trying and failing to conceal, and there was an aura of pride surrounding her as she flashed her high tech gear.

"Shari, we're alone now...can I ask you the questions I withheld back at Goldshire?" the young woman asked from behind her binoculars.

Eager to see if Blanca could focus well enough to inspect the opera house exterior on her own, Sharimara compacted her viewing glass again and left her partner to continue her spy work while reviewing the latest developments in the once great city. "About current events, yes?" she asked rhetorically.

"Yes...I want to make sure that I know everything you know. What I was going to ask about are the New True Blues. They're just puppets of Gnomeragan, Ironforge and Shadowforge attempting to revive the Alliance, right?"

"What you've said is all that needs to be known," Sharimara replied plainly. "Just more exploitation by forces other than the people themselves."

"So they really are pushing for revolution, then? Even if they don't truly speak for the people?"

"That is well known; ever since the last bread riot near the cathedral district, the machinations of virtually every group vying for power have come out into the open. The New True Blues simply have the veneer of standing up for the rights of the downtrodden." Lips finally twisting into a smirk, Sharimara chuckled deep in her throat at the futility of it all. "Just idiots standing on soapboxes in public squares, shouting about extinct traditions when they're really just the proxies of even bigger idiots many thousands of miles away."

"It's all been a pack of lies, it seems...but what about that pretender to the throne? That sole representative of the previous ruling dynasty, what's his name? Couldn't the dwarves and gnomes just use him as a proxy, instead of a bunch of rabble rousers in the streets?"

Sharimara snorted derisively. "The Linland dynasty was as corrupt and selve serving as that of King Chalmers. Neither the dwarves nor gnomes would receive any benefit from just another uncooperative human monarch. So both the pretender to the throne and the New True Blues are just a bunch of phonies peddling romanticized visions of the past: the latter of a long since dead faction of several races, the former of a fabricated time when there were supposedly fair and just monarchs, as if such a thing ever existed." She promptly remained quiet for a few minutes, stopping herself before her misanthropy led her to talk too much. Knowledge of the various competing throne seekers would be essential in the chaos that followed the assassination, but there was no need for details beyond what would help them directly.

A few more minutes passed as the two of them sat, Blanca briefly describing a few details about the posh square in front of the opera house steps while Sharimara continued to analyze every possible angle from which prying eyes could spot them. Eventually, the questions started up again, though they were at least relevant.

"Those two generals, the ones that everybody in the taverns claim are planning military coups...couldn't they bring some stability through an iron fist?"

Relaxed from her previous acrimony toward current events and politics in general, Sharimara was able to answer more evenly. "Generals Marcus and Henderson? They'll kill each other."

Blanca actually looked away from her binoculars for a moment. "Wait, where did you hear that?" she asked, clearly intrigued judging by the high arch to her brow.

"Nowhere; that's solely experience talking. Even if a military man came to the helms of power, it wouldn't change the wider forces that have doomed this city's economic development, though. The people like to believe that a group of men in a room either control everything and hoard all the money, or have the power to set things right. It's more comfortable to believe there is a sense of order to the mass behavior of mortals...but that is a fallacy. But mark my words, it will not come to pass: the two generals probably already have multiple contingency plans, all of which will fail when they both kill each other."

"You really don't think that the rich are designing the system this way?" Blanca asked pointedly.

"They might think they do...but the rebellions of peasants will prove them wrong. There is no system; that's a catch all term for the chaotic world we live in. The reality is much more frightening: nobody controls anything. That's a fact I've seen play out many, many times over the past two centuries. Nobody, not some general, not some puppet, not some legacy child and not any of the three noble families financially backing their own coup planners are going to bring any semblance of organization out of this."

Although Sharimara merely stared at the opera house and narrowed her eyes, Blanca continued looking at her. The young woman's expression was that of an optimistic youth being forced to watch what a stunning lack of difference her zeal and idealism made in the world. "That's a very negative view to take in life," she mumbled while turning back to her binoculars, her mood too deflated for an actual retort to materialize.

Many long years of bitterness and disappointment bubbled up from Sharimara's stomach before draining back down. "I suppose so," she muttered absentmindedly.

The two of them continued their inspections of city guard patrol routes in silence, which Blanca seemed resolutely uncomfortable with. "Two decades and some change, by the way," she said sideways out of her mouth as the two of them focused on their observations. "Almost three."

This time, it was Sharimara who sent an unreturned glance to her partner. "What?"

"My age. You mentioned you're at least two centuries old; I'm over two decades, almost three. I think I have a bit more learning to do before I catch up with you." A cheeky grin similar to the one she'd flashed at the tavern that morning dominated Blanca's features. "That's a joke, by the way."

Though Sharimara didn't actually comprehend the humor, she smiled at the attempt to lighten the mood. "Just a little," she replied, her voice a bit lighter in tone. Through her viewing glass, she angled upward and spied a potential entry and exit point; this would be a good test for the young woman. "Blanca...the entire opera house is five stories, but the top two are narrow and less spacious...that leaves a lower level rooftop on top of the third floor."

After a moment, Blanca adjusted her binoculars and snorted in confirmation. "Are you thinking about the access for on the roof of the third floor that leads to the fourth floor?" she asked.

"Yes. Many years ago, the fourth floor of the opera house was the floor where the cast and crew got dressed, and where the nobles and distant royals gathered in the VIP rooms. The theatre itself is only three floors high, which is why the case of the building - those first three floors - is higher."

Not needing any more prompting, Blanca began mouthing the words of an infiltration plan as she continued to look through her goggles. "The next building over from the opera house is the...Proudemoore Museum of the Arcane?" She pulled her binoculars down to look at Sharimara. "Who's Proudemoore?"

"An ancient bloodline, extinct now, but their original mother was a brilliant mage...anyway, you don't have to worry about the distance. I can blink across if I use my entire mana reserve, which is how I'll get in; I just need you to unlock the door for me. Once it's time to escape, we'll go a...different route. An escape route I can't point out to you from here. Once we're settled in to the motel room, I can show you a map."

"So this trip was just to see the door you want me to let you in through?"

"No, no. This trip was for that, and simply for us to meet up away from the motel we'll stay at, and to observe guard movements and patrol routes below, and to scope out these rooftops."

"Oh...sorry."

"Don't be. Just be aware of these rooftops, because we may need to come back this way if our other escape route goes wrong. Look there," Sharimara explained while pointing to the next rooftop over, closer in the direction of the opera house. "Can you jump across that gap?"

Blanca shot her a look that implied the young woman was quite offended. "Shari, I do parkour! The gaps between all these buildings except the opera house itself are nothing!" she practically squeaked, her voice going higher in pitch when she was upset.

"I still don't know what that means, but good information to know. Now that we've achieved what we need to, we can leave."

Sharimara packed up her viewing glass, and Blanca repeated her actions without even asking any questions. "You mentioned something about a motel...but how will we get there without anybody seeing us? I mean...your armor is a bit conspicuous, isn't it?"

"Outside of Kalimdor, it most certainly is. That's why we'll rappel down the wall of the upper city and follow the canals that carry all the waste and filth of the rich into the poor part of the city below." Blanca frowned disdainfully at the reminder of just how Stormwind's expansion projects had restructured the city. "Don't frown; we aren't here to get swept up in the same political upheaval as everyone else. This is a job: tomorrow night, we will sneak in to that building, end the monarch of this entire kingdom, and sneak back out as the covetous vultures of all the vying factions squabble for the spoils."

As Sharimara walked over to the edge of the roof overlooking the lower part of the city at the base of the plateu, Blanca followed her and sucked in a deep breath of air. "It's a worthwhile job, and one that's needed to be done for a long while," the young woman beamed. "I'm not getting swept up in the politics. I'm just happy that the reign of this tyrant will finally come to an end."

The two of them surveyed the layout of the city. The lower part at the base of plateau, where all the poor and working classes dwelled, was simply enormous. Stormwind had by far become the most populous city on Azeroth, rumored to be approaching the half million mark in terms of number of people; the next most populous city, Orgrimmar, still only boasted just over half that many. The capitol of the once great faction was cramped, crowded and sprawling, a mess of concrete and wood carved buildings from the plateau until the port. And from only one vantage point, both the wealthiest burrough of any city on the planet and the most squalid urban area could both be seen at the same time.

Narrowing her eyes at the city of crushed dreams, Sharimara shook her head and began to measure her descent into the next alleyway over. "A tyrant will fall, and others will kill each other as they race to replace him. The people will fall behind whoever gives them the most promises, and that person will then betray the ideals once fought for. And so on, and so forth, the cycle will repeat. Nothing changes except that we get paid."

She turned to lay a hand on Blanca's shoulder, attempting to look as if she were giving kind advice. "Don't lose sight of that," Sharimara added. "Come on now. We need to rent that room to store our gear...and then we need to buy our disguises. This evening will be the last chance for you to buy yourself tickets as well. We can share the basics of what we know about the situation down in the streets while we work, but we're short on time."

Once again impressing the warden with her intelligence and ingenuity, Blanca only grunted in response and actually led the way by sliding down a storm pipe onto a gargoyle below.


	3. Chapter 3

**A/N: point of view shift here. As a heads up, there will be a bit of jumping back and forth in terms of whose eyes we see through, but never in the middle of a chapter. So in this chapter, we see through Blanca's perspective and only hers. I'll do my best to note whether Sharimara or Blanca lead a chapter via the context itself at the beginning of each chapter.**

"This is true evil, it is."

Having remained at the motel only long enough to rent the room and store their belongings, the two assassins shut the window behind them and gazed four stories down toward the disgusting canal below. It ran between the motel they had rented a room at and the next run down building over, adding a sort of dank and moist air to the wide alleyway. The buildings were all of a brick shade that was drab and faded, adding to the dilapidated visage projected by the lower city.

Blanca could already feel her partner and reluctant mentor's piercing gaze upon her. "Most large cities end up like this once that...what's it called, industrial revolution begins." The giantess had wedged herself in another alcove in the side of the building containing the motel; as stealthy as Sharimara was, there were simply fewer hiding spots that could accommodate her due to her size.

The building directly in front of them appeared abandoned, and to their left was an intersection of the dirty canals weaving in between the city blocks and away from the main roads. The lonely, trash filled back alleys and canal network wasn't what bothered Blanca so much, however; only the homeless were affected by that, and they were thankfully still low in number. She felt bad for them, but there simply weren't as many. No, what bothered her was the narrow glimpse of the main street to their right they could steal between the corner of the motel and the abandoned building across from them.

Boarded up windows marked a medieval style communal residence - brick and mortar for the first two floors, wood for the next two up. The windows weren't boarded because the apartments were empty, but rather because used plywood planks were cheaper than glass. Wet newspapers had turned into disgusting goo in the gutters, alongside the uncollected garbage that most of the city's population simply tossed into the street. A few of those piles of trash were smoldering, and from Blanca knew of large cities, the trash would often pile up so high that the residents would burn it just so there would be space to pile up more.

Reaching back to ensure that they'd jimmy rigged the window to their motel room to stay shut, Blanca began looking for the easiest place to scale down the side of the building. "It doesn't have to be that way. There's so much wealth concentrated up there," she said while pointing to the plateau of the upper city looming off in the distance. "They wouldn't even have to give up their advantageous lifestyles to help the rest of their people; they'd just have to modify them slightly."

Before Blanca had even finished her sentence, Sharimara had begun to creep down the side of the building, as if the warden didn't care to listen to what she had to say. So often Blanca found her parter and mentor this way: civil in her tone of voice but dismissive and borderline disrespectful in her demeanor.

It both irritated and fascinated the young woman: Sharimara was so aloof, so controlled, and obviously so experienced with what they were doing. For years Blanca had dreamt of becoming a hitwoman or some other phantom in the darkness; the Light knew that seeking out her trainers had been hard enough coming from a mere village like she had. Now that she had a legitimate assassin working alongside her, she found herself constantly in awe of how confident, relaxed and self assured her elder was. Even as her pride was stung by Sharimara's dismissiveness, her sense of respect and even jealousy were fed.

"Greed and oppression breed the sort of resentment that gives us jobs," Sharimara said while dropping down to the narrow embankment on the side of the canal below. Blanca followed suit, and her parter waited for her to secure a perfect landing before she continues. "We're profiting from all this inequality. Don't lose sight of that as we make our preparations here, and especially once the actual assassination plot begins."

Weaving their way in and out of the almost totally abandoned maze of canals in between the various ghettoes of the lower city, the two women followed the way they'd mapped out to the tailoring district of a working class neighborhood. They'd need to buy several sets disguises, and a run down part of town (though four fifths of Stormwind seemed to be included in that) was the perfect place. Unfortunately, Blanca's partner was conspicuous even in a part of town where a large portion of the citzenry carried illegal weapons; the canals and back alleys were their only way to travel, and sending Blanca in alone to buy all of the needed clothing was their only way to disguise themselves. And since Sharimara had ordered her to burn all the clothing she'd brought in her duffel bag save her gown for the next night, they'd need to buy quite a bit.

They'd reviewed their maps of the city briefly at the motel, and despite the fact that only rats and drunk vagrants could be found near the canals, the path they'd chosen was still far more efficient than the main streets anyway. Given the silence and smooth ride, Blanca found the time to indulge her desire to confirm the rumors she'd heard about the man - the king of at least half the world's human population - they were supposed to kill in just over twenty four hours.

"You know, Shari...even if this is just work, and we're being objective, one can't help but notice that we will be the people to set into motion a chain of events that will change the entire planet. Isembard Chalmers is one of the most hated rulers in the history of the humans: there are bread riots every other week, half his government's budget is embezzled every other month, and even the nobility up there in the upper city openly speak against him in their cafés."

If Sharimara had reacted to the conversation at all, she concealed it well. "You've never been to Stormwind. It is exceedingly difficult for you to proclaim what the people do or don't feel."

"Not in this case; not when it's so well known. Look, he deposed his own half brother, the former King Harrison-"

"Harrison murdered their father, Peter."

"But for a good cause - their father was a tyrant who overthrew the dynasty of the current pretender to the throne, Darren Linland, about forty years ago. Linland's grandfather was a just ruler, as was Harrison, which is why Ironforge cut all relations fifteen years ago when Isembard overthrew his own half brother - that destroyed the economy of both the humans and the dwarves-"

"Blanca," Sharimara said, not angrily so much as very firmly. The much larger woman spun and gripped Blanca's shoulders, and she could feel the intensity of the green eyed warden's gaze. "Everything you just said...true or not...let it go. Put it out of your mind. Because no matter how objective you might think your opinions are, holding on to them will still draw your focus away from the logistics we must deal with here on the ground."

Righteous fury bubbled up inside of Blanca's throat, but cold logic forced it back down. No matter how much she did feel their job was an ethical one that would lead to empowerment of the commoners, she also knew that her partner - who was quite literally seven times her age - knew better about such matters.

"I understand," Blanca sighed, forcing herself to be honest. "We're paid for a kill quest. And that's all we're here to do."

Sharimara's lip curled up in what the mostly frigid, restrained giantess probably thought was a pleased smile. "Excellent...because here comes the next part," she said in a much lower voice. "Go around this corner here to the left, follow the canal three intersections down and then turn right onto the main street; you'll be in the tailoring district. Do you remember what you need to buy?"

"Yes, absolutely. I already have my gown for the night of as well as something nicer to wear while scouting the area openly; what we need now are six garments."

"List them."

"One for me to go buy the tickets in immediately after this; one for me to escape the city with once it's all said and done; one for you to escape the city with; one for you to wear as you wait for me to return with the tickets today; one to help me scout with more closely tomorrow; and one extra for you just in case."

"Very good. Here's all the silver you can carry without looking conspicuous," Sharimara said while slipping two coin purses to Blanca. "Buying for yourself will be simple; buying clothes my size that aren't conspicuous will be a bit tougher. Go for any sort of robes, especially those that are secondhand from organizations such as the Argent Crusade."

Blanca cocked an eyebrow. "Argent Crusade?" she asked curiously.

"An old organization, long since gone. But they were respected clerics once; those robes would help even an ogre fit in since neutral organizations like that often feature members of far flung races."

"Alright, got it. I'll try to find the most drab things I can for down here, and the closest thing to posh I can find for a nun's robes for when we're up there," Blanca replied while pointing toward the plateau of the upper city. "I'll drop the disguises off with you before I head through the portal leading to the upper city."

"Yes...this is where that family name of yours comes in handy. Now, go. I'll be waiting here for the clothes, and then you'll need to head up to the upper city for those tickets. Remember: don't scout this time; this trip isn't for that purpose. We can handle that tomorrow, and until then you don't need anybody seeing you just strolling around."

"I got it, I got it," Blanca assured her partner while turning to speed down the canal. If there was one lesson she'd taken to heart, it was to speed in between hiding spots rather than creeping around.

Sharimara squared in a fire escape on the unused side of another random anonymous building facing the canal, leaving Blanca to navigate her way through the maze and emerge in a cramped alleyway used as a home for a minor cardboard box colony as well as a hangout area for local laborers off duty. She could already hear the commotion that was probably normal for the poor inhabitants of the city even before she saw the dead, bloody corpse in the middle of the street.

Pushing her way out from in between old clothes hung to dry between the two walls of the alley she'd chosen to leave the canals from, she found herself faced with one dead body, one crying woman and a city guard besieged by angry locals.

The iron clad guard wearing a tabard with a picture of a lion on it tried his best to calm down the gathering crowd. "Move along people, there's nothing to see-"

"This guy dragged my aunt down an entire city block before people even saw them!" a youth who held the crying woman, ostensibly his aunt, shouted brazenly at the guard. "How can we live down here if we can't even be sure that the city is actually being policed!"

Eyes darting around, the guard tried to reassert his control. "Watch your tone, boy," he warned nervously while pointing directly at the young man.

"You watch your tone!" an elderly man yelled back while slamming his cane on the ground. Others from the locals began to shove the guard from behind, backing away every time he turned around and slowly pushing him down the street.

The conflict had obviously escalated before Blanca had even arrived, and she swiftly disappeared behind the crowd. Pulling her hood over her head, she walked as naturally as any of the other two dozen people lining the street who were shuffling with their heads down and their brains tuned out to whatever conflicts were unfolding around them.

Fortunately she didn't have to walk for long; just long enough to turn a few corners and avoid what sounded like a mob attack on the city guard a few streets behind her. The heart of the tailoring district was packed with clothing stores - especially used clothing stores - and Blanca didn't spend much time rummaging through boxes of old dresses, robes and hooded cloaks before she found what she needed. In spite of Sharimara's height, there were even ample articles of drab, nondescript clothing for clerics, nuns and magi of all sizes, and picking out the proper sets of clothes consumed less time than did returning to her partner (which consumed a little more time after the beleaguered city guard had whistled for his comrades to rescue him, unlike the assaulted auntie who'd relied on her fellow working poor to save her). By the time she'd maneuvered her way around all the mace swinging guards and stone throwing locals, Blanca had almost begun to worry that she'd be blamed for wasting time.

Also fortunately for her, Sharimara was more than understanding once she located the warden among the empty canals behind the city blocks again.

"Sorry for being late, but there's-"

"A near riot out there, yes, I can hear it," Sharimara said, finishing her sentence for her while inspecting the three sacks of clothes. One robe in particular caught the woman's eye. "Oh my...I was only joking when I suggested you might find Argent Crusade robes."

Blanca grinned as her partner admired the aged robes appropriately sized for a female troll, ogre or tauren. "I know, right? This is even more vintage than vintage; we could probably get some good money for it at a museum if we didn't have to burn it afterward."

"The money we can receive at the dropoff point after this job is finished will be sufficient," Sharimara replied while focusing on all the loose, worn and faded garments spilling out of the bags. "Here; this one is nice enough for you to wear while buying the tickets. Anything less would lead to you being thrown out of the upper city, and anything more might bring too much attention this early on."

"Alright, just give me a second," Blanca said while undressing behind Sharimara's cape, which the warden had pulled up to cover her despite the fact that the only other body there was that of a homeless person slumped against a building across the canal and dumped in a position that implied he might be dead. "If they allow me through the portal that leads to the upper city...that's a fifteen minute hike from here if I follow the map, then maybe a five minute delay for security at the portal, and according to the map another five minute hike to the ticket booth-"

"Ten minutes to the ticket booth," Sharimara corrected. "You'll be walking like a normal pedestrian in the upper city, not hiking through a maze of canals."

"Right...ten minutes to the ticket booth, which means an hour total there and back, plus however long I must deal with the ticketmaster himself. So an hour minimum."

"I won't move from this spot...but don't delay," Sharimara replied just as Blanca finished getting dressed. "If at any point either one of us is more than an hour late to a rendezvous-"

"Then we assume they've been killed and that we're on our own," Blanca said, finishing her partner's sentence just as she finished getting dressed.

"Good memory. Now, go." Stepping backward, Sharimara wedged herself in a tiny space between two buildings that couldn't even be described as an alley. "I'll be right here...good luck."

"Thanks."

Turning about face and scanning her memory for the map they'd studied briefly at the motel, Blanca backtracked away from the tailoring district and began to jog down the route she'd planned on for reaching the portal district. At the time that Stormwind was founded, there was only one urban area and the port; it was hard to imagine such a time, because for all of Blanca's life the common knowledge her village had received was that the city sprawled further back into areas that were once forest, surrounding a flat plateau with hundreds of slums. As a result, the former palace district became a prison while the rich and the royals hired magi to teleport their villas and mansions atop the plateau, too high for all but those such as Sharimara and Blanca herself to scale.

As imposing as that prison was, it also served as the most secure area for shipments of food and consumer goods to be teleported to the upper city, and Blanca found herself faced with increasingly less busy streets and more frequent guard barricades and random checkpoints. When the palace turned prison came into view, she found that the city guards had taken drastic measures since the start of all the unrest; cobblestone roads and sidewalks had been blasted and ripped up out of the ground in a series of wedges, and wooden ramparts right in the city streets, right in between government buildings, had been laid down. Not to prevent invasion from an opposing army, mind you, but from an uprising of the city's own inhabitants.

Blanca stopped at the first checkpoint, pulling out the ID card she'd stolen from her extended family. Sharimara had known one thing about her: although she'd been born in a village, and although she was technically one eighth blood elf and one sixteenth orc, Blanca was a second cousin of human nobility. And lucky enough for her, she resembled her twice removed cousin just enough that she could use the woman's ID and their shared family name in order to gain entry to the upper city.

One of the three city guards manning the first checkpoint - a rickety wooden hurdle in between two ramparts in the street - grew tired of waiting for the long line of delivery people and traveling nobles in carriages and began walking down the line, simply checking identification papers and waving people through. The haggard, mustacheod man took the laminated paper from Blanca.

"Miss...Elizabetha Sheradon," the man read off while giving Blanca only a cursory glance. "Good family. Go ahead."

Without any stress at all, Blanca skipped the line and walked past a jeweler arguing about the bribe he was being asked for in broad daylight. The flat but narrow road wound around, surrounded in both sides by drab government offices and guard barracks that were mostly empty. The atmosphere was like that of a ghost town, but the lack of crowding was a breath of fresh air from the rest of the city. As was the case at the first, Blanca was shooed past the second and third checkpoints, all of which were understaffed and overcrowded with all sorts of unauthorized peddlers attempting to smuggle their wares to the more lucrative markets atop the upper city.

When she reached the third checkpoint, however, she could already tell that something was off. There wasn't any specific sign that she'd be able to point out; it was just a general feeling that she experienced.

Beyond the first three checkpoints, the number of people waiting in line was much lower. That made sense: many people had been turned away at earlier checkpoints due to lack of the proper licensing or the correct family name. Others were found to be smuggling contraband or goods upon which neither a tariff nor a bribe had yet been paid. And in one case, Blanca was treated to a sight: her first glimpse of the New True Blues.

Though the man hadn't worn any particularly descriptive clothing, he'd looked shifty enough that one of the guards had questioned him. When he resisted, they forced him to the ground brutally and searched his personal satchel to find leaflets with crude, unflattering drawings of King Isembard Chalmers frolicking with a racist caraciture of a female quilboar. In clear view of the others waiting at the checkpoint, the subversive human male was beaten unconscious, accused of being an unusually tall and skinny dwarf from Ironforge and promptly dragged into the guard barracks rather than a proper jail. Blood boiled in Blanca's veins; even if the New True Blues were just puppets of s foreign country, the idea of a man being beaten and then dragged off to possibly be tortured all for carrying leaflets felt like a slap in the face of human dignity.

Her blood didn't have long to boil, however; at the fourth and final checkpoint, in viewing distance of the two story mage tower containing the portal to the upper city, the line suddenly slowed down. Only two guards were working at this last set of ramparts, though there were only three people in front of her. One of the two guards was obviously suspicious, though; he stared at Blanca the entire time as she waited in line with her head down. Not in the lustful sort of way that typical led to her beating up grown men, but in the genderless sort of standoffish way of a person who was expecting a conflict. The guard's stare put her in edge and caused the fine hairs on the back of her neck to stand up on end.

The person at the head of the line was allowed through, promptly striding forward and disappearing into the portal. Blanca became very aware of the exact rate of her pulse as the veins in her thumbs and index fingers throbbed in unison, and the tickle of a single bead of sweat trickling down the front of her scalp despite the autumn weather drove her mad. For a moment the angry guard became distracted by a question from his colleague, but the respite lasted for only a few seconds before he began staring her down again.

When there was only one person ahead of her in line, the stern man lost his patience and jabbed his finger at her rudely. "You there. Show me your papers," he ordered in an aggressive tone.

Biting her tongue, she forced herself to remain congenial despite her burning desire to test out the neck snapping technique she'd learned. "Of course, officer," she replied as shyly as a proper lady with a demure, doormat like upbringing should.

Snatching the document rom her rudely, the man turned his nose up in a rather patronizing manner as he inspected it. Tension mounted as another person from the previous checkpoint lined up behind her, silence ringing in her ears as if it were a deafening foghorn. Imaginary itches began to poke at her forearms, and she fought to shift her head just enough for that infuriating bead of sweat on her scalp to rub off in the fabric of the stylistic handkerchief she wore over her hair.

The guard sneered. "Sheradon? Never heard of this family," the man huffed dismissively. "What are you looking to sell up there?" The man's question was so suggestive that it took every ounce of Blanca's willpower not to throttle him right there.

A forced innocent little girl voice helped to quell the very real anger welling up inside of her. "Sheradon is a well known house descending from Ellwynd natives," she replied, pronouncing her family name just a little bit louder in a desperate attempt to drag the other city guard into it.

For at least the fourth time that day, luck was in her side. "Farquhar, stop wasting time. That's a well known family." The other guard's tone was distracted and just as dismissive, earning him a dirty look from the mustacheod man in iron.

Without even giving Blanca a second look, he tossed the laminated sheet back at her. "Get moving," he ordered, injecting as much bile into a two word sentence as he could.

Shoulders still tense, Blanca forced herself not to lash out with an elbow to the side of his skull as she brushed past him. "You're too kind," she announced in a tone so passive aggressively cutesy that even a priest would have been inclined to hit her. The shocked look on the man's face was so very worth it that she wouldn't have been deterred even if he had struck her.

Like a heavy backpack falling off, the tension rolled over her shoulders as they relaxed and tumbled to the ground behind her. Striding as she'd observed people doing before her, Blanca entered the mage tower and then the portal inside without even greeting the novice technicians keeping the enchanted channeling crystals warm. Energy crackled around her and she found herself standing at the edge of the upper city - this time, among the people rather than hiding on the rooftops.


	4. Chapter 4

**A/N: back to Sharimara's perspective for now. The ninth and tenth chapters will also be told through her eyes, though chapters five through eight will be all Blanca. This story was originally written over four years ago, so it's easier to track all the chapters and points of view now.**

Sharimara crawled even higher, holding her position at the top of the five story building but hiding beneath the awning hanging off the edge of the roof. Although it was broad daylight, she had a few things going for her in terms of stealth that late afternoon. Or early evening, as dusk was rapidly approaching.

People rarely looked too far above their own heads even when searching indoor or cramped outdoor areas. On more than one mission, she'd wedged herself in a corner near the ceiling of a hallway and successfully ambushed even experienced guards and patrol people due to the general lack of attention to the sky. Dropping right on top of a hostile target carried a certain satisfaction, the kind of rush that simply cliff diving into the ocean or jumping off of a hippogriff so it could catch you didn't; those activities didn't involve victory over a sentient opponent.

The shade provided by the awning helped as well. Wedged in an alcove, the simply lack of sunlight wasn't sufficient for her to actually shadowmeld; she was only half night elf, her other half being jungle troll, and her connection to the balance of nature wasn't quite strong enough to turn transparent during daylight hours. But that slight bit of darkness was just enough to keep her form concealed.

The fact that she was still in the narrow path formed by the gap between buildings also meant that the people passing by on the street perpendicular to the canals meant that virtually nobody even bothered looking in her general direction. Those that did would find any possible view of her obstructed by a stone gargoyle, anyway.

Hidden in her spot, Sharimara was free to observe the surroundings while she waited for Blanca to return. As she'd suspected, the homeless person across the canal from them was dead; just another anonymous loss of life in a city of people just trying to survive.

Even Orgrimmar, despite being a step lower in terms of sanitation and general quality of life technology, lacked the sort of desperate air she could sense around her in Stormwind. Both cities were overpopulated, but the people in the capitol of a faded but still extant faction known as the Horde seemed to feel satisfied with less. Simply living day to day appeared to be the modus operandi of the people she could spy passing by on the street to her left. Once the city guards and local youth had fought to a standstill over the issue of the assaulted auntie and then mutually backed off, the people had returned to their daily business. Heads down, pace quickened and voices murmuring, they were every bit the pessimistic picture Blanca had painted of a people on the verge of revolt.

Such matters were of no concern to Sharimara, however. She'd lived long enough to know how the cycle went: dictator abuses populace, populace endures, desperation and misery rises, populace speaks out, dictator clamps down, populace overthrows ruling order violently, an even more violent ruling class proves to be the only entity capable of bringing order to such a chaotic society, and the cycle began all over again. Rinse and repeat. Tragic series of events had unfolded elsewhere with the same results; Stormwind in the mid to late third century was no different.

Just around the corner, an upset voice echoed and reached Sharimara's ears. Another rabble rouser had stood up on a soapbox, ranting and raving about the power of the people in order to work the crowd. The way the man focused on port tariffs implied that he was one of many paid plants courtesy of Nathan Tucker, one of the various Stormwind nobles vying for power were a vacuum to present itself and actively working toward that end. Much to Sharimara's surprise, the jaded citizenry followed the signs rather quickly and accused the man of being paid by a business magnate due to the constant mentions of tariffs for shipping fleets. An argument ensued that escalated, and soon enough the warden found herself rolling her eyes as another miniature riot started to form.

Blanca showed up during that chaotic backdrop, clinging to her personal bag that ostensibly contained the tickets. Judging by the young woman's proud demeanor despite having just walked through a political riot, Sharimara could only assume that the mission to the upper city to purchase tickets for the opera tomorrow night had been a success.

Pride swelled up in the warden's own chest. She didn't know the woman personally and could only speculate, and she certainly wasn't responsible for Blanca's training or professional development. Regardless, there was an admiration there; a sort of identification. Sharimara herself had been a novice once, though her transition wasn't as rough as she imagined Blanca's was. To see the young woman accepting her advice and following her examples so quickly both pleased her but also filled her with dread; of the people Sharimara had partnered with during her early years, very few died natural deaths. Acceptance of that fact was mandatory in order to steel one's-

"Shit," the warden muttered to herself as a side door flew open in the alleyway, blocking Blanca's path.

After nearly two hundred years of experience in infiltration and subterfuge, Sharimara had allowed something to slip her attention: she hadn't searched the building to see if anybody could ambush them from inside. Cursing herself for overlooking the possibility of the dilapidated city block not being totally abandoned, she began to creep downward as she observed the scene cautiously.

Two other humans had emerged from the door to ambush Blanca, who intelligently held her hands up without conflict. A female human held the door open with one hand and wielded a knife in the other; the male human had noticed an arrow on a bow and was poised to skewer Blanca at point blank range. The young assassin in training took a defensive stance but made no move to strike just yet.

"Money. Jewelry. Whatever you have," the female hissed, dark circles under her eyes implying malnourishment.

"Don't give me a reason!" the male warned, but nervously. The couple obviously weren't career criminals and were likely acting out of the same desperation as most other muggers in such cities were.

Desperate or not, truly evil or not, they were both jeopardizing the mission. There would be no negotiation or discussion with such people. Before Blanca could even each to hand over the satchel (or a throwing knife, directly in the couple's necks), Sharimara released her grip from the walls of the alcove. Rather than pushing off, she simply allowed herself to drop down, falling so effortlessly that even her young partner didn't seem to notice.

In one fluid motion, Sharimara pulled the double bladed fel glaive from her baldric, beneath her cape. The weapon was a mainstay of all varieties of trolls, preferred by the shadow hunters like her late father. The weapon didn't return upon being thrown unlike the moon glaive favored by her late mother, but part of the goal was that there would be no reason to strike a second time if the attack was executed properly. And in this case, it was.

While her feet were still airborne, Sharimara came low enough to bring the fel glaive onto the necks of both hostile humans. She landed in between the couple and Blanca, filling up the entire gap and causing the young assassin to stumble backward. When the warden's boots hit the ground, both heads rolled to the ground, coinciding with the wild arrow bouncing off of Sharimara's chestpiece. The bodies both tumbled to the ground from the force of her swing, though there was only a few second delay before she kicked both bodies and heads into the canal.

"Shit!" Blanca repeated without even knowing it as she scrambled to her feet. "What the...Shari, that was badass! I mean...I could totally have dodged that arrow, but I would have taken at least two stab wounds before I snapped both of their necks!"

Despite the absurdity, Sharimara understood the importance of allowing the young woman to maintain her dignity. "Saved you the trouble. Though to be honest, I should have searched inside the building while you were gone. That was...a serious oversight."

Reaching up to place a reassuring hand on the much older and more experienced woman's shoulder, Blanca seemed to miss all the irony of her behavior. "Dont worry, Shari; mistakes help us to learn," she said, failing to understand that the warden's smirk was slightly derisive.

"Indeed they do," the warden replied, keeping all retorts to herself. "But now that they're taken care of...we can breathe a little bit easier. We won't be scouting until tomorrow morning, and we have ample time to return to the motel before the night watch begins to monitor the streets in our district." She eyed Blanca curiously. "And your mission was a success?"

"A resounding one," Blanca chirped while sifting through her satchel. "There was a minor incident at the checkpoints outside the portal leading up, but once I was in the upper city...by the Light, Shari, it's decadent. It's awful. There are employees of the city government whose job is to stand on each street - each side, even - and pick up any trash the rich people litter. The amount of material waste is unbelievable."

"How many tickets did you buy?" Sharimara asked intently, ignoring the political rant. "Please tell me you bought at least too."

"I bought four. There wasn't any security at the ticket booth, but I didn't want to raise eyebrows. I used the family name and claimed I was buying late tickets for my relatives. Porting back down here was a cinch - the nobility isn't forced to walk through any security at all when gracing the untouchables with their magnificent presence."

"Focus, Blanca. You'll need to mingle with those uptight nobles and royals soon enough. Especially for the next mission we'll need to undertake in addition to scouting the ground in the upper city tomorrow morning."

Blanca cocked an eyebrow. "An addition to the scouting?" she asked, her voice laced with both curiosity and concern.

The warden nodded, looking rather solemn. "Yes...I've recalculated the timing of everything since you've been gone, and I realized that in between scouting the area tomorrow morning and actually sneaking in to the opera, there won't be any time for us to return to the motel here in the lower city. You'll need to rent a new, separate room up above to change clothes and prepare in. Plus, you'll need time in order to...find an escort."

"Escort?" Blanca asked, her eyes as wide as saucers. "But I don't know anybody here in town!"

"You'll find that city dwellers, especially the upper class, are much more lax in terms of mingling with strangers than the people of whatever village you came from. That's the general rule among virtually all peoples of the world."

Blanca glanced at her boots shyly. "Okay...okay...you're right; it would appear odd to the guards if I show up all dressed but alone to the opera," she reasoned, impressing Sharimara again with how quickly her logic overpowered her anxieties.

Just as she was about to speak again, both of them were silenced by a sound. A soft, angelic, innocent sound...and it absolutely terrified her.

"Mommy?"

Frozen. Blanca stood absolutely frozen before Sharimara, petrified and catatonic. For a split second Sharimara tried to lie to herself and deny what the sound truly was. Not due to any sort of shock on her own part, mind you; in a career spanning nearly two centuries, Sharimara had seen far more than what was a fair share of heartbreak and loss for only one person, both her own and that of her allies and enemies alike. This was a more logistical worry: the fear that her partner was too green, too new to the line of taking lives as a profession to wrap her head around what they'd just heard.

Inching slowly to duck her head down beneath the doorway, Sharimara found exactly what she'd expected. In their desperation, the now deceased couple had been robbing passersby for their valuables in order to live. They'd probably even killed the homeless person across the street by the looks of him; the corpse was too close to be convenient for such a lawless city where criminals often acted with impunity.

And among all the obviously stolen goods inside the cramped one room apartment laid a mattress with two young children half asleep on top. They bore the same hair color as the male of the human couple Sharimara had just killed, and one of the two children clearly bore the female's nose.

Having peeked beneath the warden's looming head, Blanca appeared to have fallen beyond words. "The...the...the...kids...the kids...that couple...kids," she babbled softly, sounding as if she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown with almost no escalation at all.

Sharimara groaned inside; she did not need her partner losing resolve this close to the final goal.

Putting her fast thinking brain to good use, Sharimara acted on the first plan in her mind that could lead to both the people passing on the next street discovering the now orphaned urchins, and she and Blanca escaping before they were noticed. Scooping up Blanca in one arm and grabbing a glass bottle in another, she tossed the glass bottle up the sidewalk next to the canal, aiming right for the sidewalk on the main street so people walking by would take notice. Simultaneously, she moved her now free hand to clamp Blanca's mouth shut. Closing her own eyes and tapping into her mana reserve, she cast her blink spell.

There were only three other occasions where she'd cast the spell while holding another person; very few wardens ever learned how to teleport both themselves and another person due to the fact that it drained their mana pool so much. Even the great Maiev Shadowsong, whom Sharimara had met briefly before the woman's death from old age, never cast the spell that way. And Sharimara immediately knew why: the moment she and Blanca reappeared about ten yards away from the group of locals gathering around to inspect the broken bottle, she could already feel that sinking drag that pulled one down after expending a great deal of mana in a single moment.

Confident that the locals were slowly inspecting the canal and thus the open door where the new orphans were waking up - the locals appeared to police their own streets in the evening since the city guard had proved unwilling to do so - Sharimara slowed down their pace as she fled, blinking only a single other time just to cross two canals at once at an intersection and then resigning herself to simply running once she felt the sting of mana burn.

Kicking her legs and gripping Sharimara's hand, Blanca proved uncooperative during the flight back home. Responding accordingly, Sharimara continued to carry the young woman all the way back toward their motel like an unruly child, refusing to stop despite her own sudden fatigue until they'd reached the same watery passageway where they'd initially left from, just a few floors below the window to their rented room. Whisking Blanca into a cramped dead end containing a pile of unused wooden crates, the warden knelt down and forcibly sat Blanca against the wall.

"I'm going to remove my hand from your mouth now, alright?" she asked rhetorically. When Blanca nodded, Sharimara held her end of the miniature deal. "Okay, Blanca...I want you to take a deep breath. Even if it seems silly, do it. Don't just say you understand; take a deep breath."

"Okay...alright."

"There's a good girl. Now...I don't want you to talk too much at one time. Tell me what you're feeling in short bursts-"

"Their parents!" Blanca gasped. "We killed their mom and dad mmph."

Placing her pinky finger over Blanca's lips again, the older woman silenced her. "Breathe. Again, breathe."

"Okmmph."

"There. Now, think hard...those two parents were about to kill you. Ask yourself honestly: your choice is between letting them have parents and not dying. Would you choose to die for their sakes if you could go back?"

Blanca shook her head defiantly. "Those kids are orphans...Light, it all happened so fast...how could it have happened so fast?" She didn't appear to be asking a question to much as merely muttering whatever came to her mind, and Sharimara fought to keep the young woman grounded.

"Would you have chosen to die?" the she asked again.

"I...well...no."

"Good. Now understand, Blanca, that if you go back there to help get those kids to an orphanage, you will be spotted and possibly taken in for questioning. And if you end up in jail after having been told about an assassination plot against the king by our employers, I guarantee that they will find out, and they will have you killed in your cell before the next sunrise. Do you understand?"

Panting for a few moments, Blanca just stared into her lap, defeated. "Yes..." she mumbled, forcing a surprisingly calm tone into her voice.

"Then you must understand that there is nothing we can do for them. Their parents attacked you; they got what they deserved for that specific act. They're the ones who doomed their children, and just like with the other thousands of orphans out there, you can't let yourself be affected by each and every one of them even if it's not your fault. You'll never be able to function normally."

"I get it," Blanca huffed, finally regaining some of the strength in her tone. She brushed off her dress as if signaling that she was ready to stand, though it was obvious from her demeanor that her mind was mired in conflict.

Experience had taught Sharimara that on a mission, such misgivings couldn't be properly dealt with and resolved; there wasn't any time and the process would affect one's nerve and focus. Instead, the only solution was to accept the strain on one's cardiovascular health and simply repress all the feelings, shoving them deep down inside until later.

"Put it out of your mind. We have reviewing to do of the mission." Rising and offering her hand, Sharimara watched her young partner as the two of them stretched and glanced up at the window of their motel room again. "Are you good to go?"

More of that defiance rose up, and instead of finding Blanca to be recalcitrant, Sharimara took it as a sign that the young woman had an emotional shell of her own to crawl in to. "I'm fine," she replied sharply.

"Good. Come on, then...up we go."

A few minutes later and the two of them had scaled the side of the building, unlocked the window and returned to their motel room. Blanca closed the curtains, taking her time adjusting the edges while Sharimara simply tossed the bags of disguises on the floor and began stripping off her armor. The arrow hadn't put a dent in it, but after having quite literally scaled the plateau, traversed the upper city, rappelled back down, run to the motel, then to the tailoring district, killed to people and run back, she'd begun to feel icky. Even elves sweat when pressed hard enough, and being only half elf, Sharimara could already feel the grime beneath the leather jerkin she wore inside of her armor. Simply removing both layers felt relaxing, and when she sprawled out on her oversized mattress she almost forgot that her companion was still working hard to repress emotional distress.

Eyeing the young woman standing in the corner of the single shared room, Sharimara sought the correct words to help Blanca reconcile what had happened without giving her any avenue to blame themselves or dwell on the matter. Which was exceedingly difficult, as Sharimara knew herself to be a poor speaker who lacked the eloquence to match her intellect.

"Blanca...you told me you always dreamt of being a hitwoman."

Leaning against the windowsill, Blanca sighed deeply without turning around. "Yeah..."

Observing as a sense of defeat in the face of reason washed over the young woman, Sharimara carefully pushed the envelope even further. "Then you must accept the fact that the world isn't black and white. You will kill people who have families. Many of them are evil, rotten bastards, but they still have families. Hitwoman, assassin, bounty huntress...call it whatever you want, but our kind turn kids into orphans and spouses into widows and widowers. This time, I handled it. When the time comes that your life or your partner's is on the line...don't forget what it is you seek to become."

Blanca turned around, pinching the bridge of her nose tightly. She looked like she was fighting against herself, which was an admirable effort to undertake in the first place; that she appeared to win in the end actually increased Sharimara's respect for the budding assassin despite the emotional display in the alley.

"You're right...I know you're right. And, this was my first time seeing the results of what we do...I will learn and understand. I just need more experience."

"There's that strength I've seen in you before," Sharimara said warmly, a sort of warmth only two contract killers would properly understand between themselves.

Wiping her face one last time before sitting on the edge of her own bed, Blanca recollected herself and returned to almost normal after mere minutes of discussion. "Thanks. I want to do this...I want to become this. It just...it was shocking. That wasn't an assassination job. The separation of parents and children like that feels like such a big deal," she sighed.

Despite her cool, calculating exterior, Sharimara felt a knife stab into her heart for the first time in a very long time. The muscles in her jaw tensed, and she struggled to ignore or repress the memory of the words that had just fallen out of her partner's mouth. "More than you know," the murmured before pulling herself into a sitting position on the mattress. "Get ready, now. We need to sleep in an hour or so; rest is essential to a job well done. And before we sleep, we still need to review our maps of the city, the opera house interior, draw our infiltration plan and discuss the guard movements we observed this morning."

Blanca glanced at the stack of maps they'd hidden beneath her bed. "Let's not waste time then; I'm exhausted. But I also need to know the details about this new hotel room and escort business," she said while stretching briefly before pulling the maps out.

Mind refocused, Sharimara smiled coyly at the diligence Blanca displayed despite her emotional distress over the previous incident. Perhaps she'd have to reevaluate the planned ending for the entire ordeal.


	5. Chapter 5

**A/N: jump back to Blanca's perspective here, as well as for the three following chapters.**

Blanca nearly tripped again as she tried her best to remain steady in the covering yet right dress she'd brought to wear in the upper city. Having grown up in a village of only a few hundred people, she was quite unaccustomed to wearing stereotypically 'girly' clothes. Walking down the stairs of the hotel she'd rented a new room in had been difficult enough; sneaking into a secluded and empty public garden out in the back to meet up with her partner had been downright irritating.

"Ouch!" Blanca yelped, not in pain but rather in irritation as she felt the seam of her expensive dress almost rip due to her usual brusque strides.

Resigning herself to sit pretty as upper class ladies tended to do, she found a stone bench in the garden and sat down, content to wait for Sharimara to arrive. Because Blanca could still gain access to the upper city, she'd woken up later than her partner before sneaking out. They didn't formally check out of the hotel since that could cause people to connect dots once the dirty deed was done; instead, they left it rented but unlocked, since many guests would ostensibly flee the city due to the inevitable unrest.

While Blanca passed the checkpoints, teleported up to the top of the plateau and rented the room, Sharimara was left with her disguise, armor and grappling hook to scale the sheer cliff face the old fashioned way. Both of them had done so the day before, and Blanca knew how tiring it was; the thought of doing so again sounded dreadful, and she was quite grateful that her part of the mission required her to simply unlock the access door for her conspicuous partner, create diversions for the guards on the third floor of the opera house and mingle with the locals. At least she might get to actually enjoy part of her time there in the city.

Oddly enough, she hadn't even waited at the garden for an hour before she heard Sharimara's characteristically long yet light footsteps approaching in the grass. The sound of plate armor clinking and pressing against a burlap sack reached her ears, and she knew that the older woman was storing her armor for safe keeping in an isolated place. A measure of excitement welled up inside of her as she wondered how Sharimara would look when donning the Argent Crusade robes she'd bought.

She didn't have to wait long. "Shari! I never thought you could actually look cute!" Blanca chirped while jumping to her feet and hobbling over toward the berobed Amazon.

The clerical robes were smooth and unwrinkled despite their advanced age - perhaps even older than the woman wearing them - and they left virtually all of the woman covered. Only Sharimara's violet-blue hands and chin, as well as her indigo lips, could be clearly seen.

Oh...those, and her ears. The hood sported to cute little ear holes for comfort, and Blanca had to resist running up and hugging the giantess that was supposed to be her partner in an assassination plot of national proportions.

Though the large woman never smiled, she somehow appeared even more morose upon hearing the reaction her garb garnered. "I'd prefer to focus on the mission, please," she said, holding her voice firm but displaying what almost seemed like self consciousness via her attitude. That such an ancient and highly skilled being could feel shy over how she had dressed just made Blanca want to reach up and pinch her cheeks.

"Oh, alright Shari," Blanca chortled, though her interlocutor didn't appear to find the matter funny. "So I have the hotel room, everything is stored, and I have the tickets. What's the plan?"

Peering around to be sure they were alone, the more experienced of the two leaned down to speak in a low tone. "I'll be leading the escape once we finish the job; so I'll do most of the legwork in terms of scouting the area for potential dead ends or alternate routes. All you need to do, once the target falls, is exploit the chaos that will surely ensue inside and sneak up to the third floor; I won't move from that spot until you reach me."

"Which means that I'll be doing less of the legwork this morning?"

"Precisely. About that escort business..."

"Yes, about that. I understand that I can appear alone, but do you really think it's safe in regard to our mission for me to just pick up any guy off of the street?"

"No, not any guy; remember the comment I made last night?"

Blanca thought for a minute, searching through the general conversation they'd held in the motel regarding the importance of blending in to the crowd and not standing out alone. "Oh...you mean about naïve boys?" she asked, remembering a detail that had seemed less significant.

"Boy typically refers to someone underage, but if you're using the word in the metaphorical sense, then yes. Someone who's upbeat, well mannered, and preferably a bit sheltered by whatever wealthy family he belongs to up here in the upper city. Such a person is less likely to ask questions or suspect you of anything. Only if that fails do you try to find local women to befriend and accompany as a group."

For the first time, Blanca found that defiance didn't well up inside of her in reaction to comments she found daunting. Instead, a sort of apprehension tightened up inside of her chest. Never in her life had she been picked on or bullied; but then again, never in her life had there been any possibility of such a thing occurring. She'd grown up in a simple village in the Arathi Highlands, an independent settlement pledging allegiance to no nation or faction and where humans and orcs mixed relatively freely (hence the genes she'd received from her great great grandmother, who had been an orc). Nobody teased each other, but nobody new ever passed through either. In a totally self sufficient community, one often gained little experience in meeting new people.

"Shari...um...how do I do that?" she asked pensively.

The slight tilt of Sharimara's chin as the woman tilted her head only caused Blanca to feel even shier. "How do you meet people?"

"Well...yeah. I don't know anybody here. I can stalk and interrogate targets, don't get me wrong, but I don't know how to actually befriend someone I have no connection to."

In an odd display of physical contact, Sharimara actually placed a hand on the back of Blanca's shoulder and guided her out of the garden and toward the street. "You don't; that's the point. Just like when you're attempting to extract information from a target, you're not actually befriending these people. You're ticking them like you do everyone else. And if you really want to fit the role, then understand that that's what rich ladies do; they never actually show their true face even to their so called friends. In a way, you need to be someone you're not - which is both your job and your best ticket to fit in here. Now, come; I'll bring you close enough and explain more."

The two of them went for a stroll, just a well dressed noblewoman and her oversized nun friend walking down the streets of a café district just a few blocks over from the hotels. Despite the fact that the Argent Crusade was an organization that had apparently ceased to exist more than a century earlier, nobody actually paid any mind to the eight foot tall woman with long ears as they began to pass merchants and landowners going for their morning walks. As Sharimara had predicted, there was a sort of reverence for clergy given how strongly the priestly supported whoever was in power (the paladins had long ago been ejected from Stormwind) and that reverence caused the older woman to actually become less conspicuous than Blanca herself. Literally the only acknowledgment Sharimara received on their way to the café district were a few nods and respectfully bowed heads from locals too deferent to notice that the symbol on her robes belonged to an inactive group.

On a narrow street overlooking the only canal running east to west across the plateau sat a string of bistros and posh restaurants. A predominantly young crowd, wealthy and without the need for jobs, whittled their time away while sipping at an infuriatingly slow pace on blends of coffee and tea that were greatly overpriced due to the parse amounts of spices and fatty toppings sprinkled over them. Blanca could already feel her blood pressure rising when Sharimara pulled her behind a small hedge maze a single street down.

"I hate these people already," Blanca muttered.

"Focus. Here's what you're going to do. Stop at the first café where you can find men your age or younger sitting either alone or in groups of no more than four."

"I'm not that old..."

"Make sure they're well dressed and clean cut; no piercings or tattoos or anything. Someone reading a book, or even better writing a book, would be best. Sit in the loneliest corner of the interior and try to scout for a place where the target male could view you, but where you wouldn't be surrounded by other people."

"And...I just wait for them to walk up to me?"

"No. There's a chance that might happen, but we don't have time; remember, this is supposed to be a two day, in and out job. You need to be the damsel in distress; upper class men, boys, whatever, prefer demure little things who they believe will wait at home for them. Come here."

Sliding her hand up under Blanca's long jacket sleeve, Sharimara dug her fingernails into the skin. Her nails weren't sharp like those of pureblooded Kaldorei, but it certainly didn't feel good.

"Shari, what the hell!"

"Hold still; I just need to get your eyes to tear up a little bit."

"Ouch!"

"The story is that you were scheduled to meet your boyfriend for the opera, but he ditched you for someone else. You're drowning your sorrows in a cup of green tea at the café where the two of you were supposed to eat brunch, which means you're a distraught damsel on the rebound with free tickets to the opera. And now that this spot on your forearm is good and tender-"

"That's enough! You're going to break the skin!"

"-you can make sure to scratch yourself there, and get your eyes to water up at the right moment. The bottom line is that when you queue up to enter the opera house at six o'clock tonight, you're not alone. Keep him distracted with the mingling beforehand, unlock that access door for me at seven, and be ready to meet up in the third floor at eight."

"Wait a minute...if you can blink through walls-"

"I can't see through them; I have no way of knowing if I'm teleporting in the middle of a retinue of royal guards or not." Sharimara's expression suddenly became stern. "If they get in the way..."

"Then I know what to do," Blanca sighed. "I'm ready, Shari. I can do this. Especially when I don't have to actually see the bereaved relatives of whoever tries to stop us."

"Good girl...okay...on you go." Sharimara nudged her away from the hedge maze before disappearing inside herself, leaving the well dressed young assassin on her own.

Even as she walked anonymously past several cafés, Blanca already felt embarrassed. She'd have to pretend to be some loser who'd been stood up and was essentially begging for company. Of course, none of it was true, but if she had to act the part, she had to feel it; and she was surprised by how awful it felt.

Three establishments down the street, she finally found the correct combination she was looking for: a poorly lit bistro with high partitions in between each seating booth, and filled to the brim with a younger, preppier crowd of patrons.

At first she was about to simply seat herself, but noticing how most everyone else appeared to be happily chatting in groups or curled up with a book and coffee,Blanca realized that she'd have to look the part of the abandoned young woman. Folding her hands in front of her, she solemnly waited for a server to take notice.

"Table or booth?" the similarly young though much less fit woman asked.

Taking a deep breath, Blanca tried her best to channel whatever sort of negativity she felt about the world in general into her recited lines. "Booth for two...no, I'm sorry. Booth for one," she sighed heavily. She was almost worried that she over acted the tone of voice, but when the server didn't react she assumed that it was fine.

She made sure to trail behind the server on the way to a booth in the back near the toilets. Focusing her eyes in the floor, she was still able to notice via her peripheral vision that a few heads turned as she walked by, though not enough such that she'd draw attention to herself. Her heart pounded the way it had when the city guard Farquhar had stared her down, only this time her pulse didn't race due to fear. This felt like deception of an entire room full of people, like a disguise on a mass scale without the usage of makeup or wigs. The high she received from simply sitting down alone at a booth was powerful, and she almost forgot that she'd need to look morose.

Pinching the tender part of her forearm beneath the table, she winced and almost balked at the idea of harming herself. Other spies and assassins went to much greater ends, she reminded herself, and her discomfort at the idea of self harm actually helped a few tears to drop much more easily than she'd expected. She knew she was no wimp, and mere pain in and of itself might not have sufficient to cause her to weep otherwise.

The server returned, thankfully paying her little mind. "Alright, what'll it be?" the overwhelmed service worker asked half heartedly.

"Any sort of dessert drink with chocolate in it," Blanca replied. "And please put a cherry on top of some whip cream and add two straws instead of one."

"Drinking straws are extra; hay and straw are actually in short supply these days."

"I don't mind."

A few more heads turned as she continued to stare at the tabletop, but Blanca kept her hands folded in front of her until her dessert drink arrived. When she pushed her straw around with her finger, the scene was apparently too much for one forward yet kind youth to bear. There was no way the morning could have unfolded any better.

"Is everything alright?"

The voice was deep yet soft, like a broad chested man attempting to speak in a soothing tone. It was pleasant to listen to, and the young man sounded so concerned for a stranger (for he didn't actually know who she was) that Blanca guessed he couldn't have had much experience with women. When she looked up, she almost lost sight of the mission: the athletic young man wore a Stormwind tabard but held himself with such a loose demeanor that he couldn't possibly have seen combat previously, or at least not outside of a training ground for the children of nobles. His face bore just enough stubble to imply that he possessed a sort of ruggedness that he probably lacked in reality, but not so much that he looked unkempt. Disappointment due to the fact that she was only using him temporarily before the king fell poked at her.

"Oh...well...I guess so," she sighed, letting another tear drop down her cheek, mostly due to the sting in her eye than any sort of residual pain in her arm. "I'm still alive, right?" Almost pushing the line too far, she pretended to absentmindedly flick the other straw in the drink, visually emphasizing the fact that a second person was missing.

The young man's handsome face molded itself into a frown, and she berated herself internally for fantasizing about pressing her loose lips against his pursed pair. "Life is about more than merely survival," the young noble replied, likely missing the irony of his statement due to privilege. "Do you mind if I keep you company?"

That fast? she thought to herself. This was going much better than she'd expected. "I...I don't want to impose." Forcing a fake shudder in her voice, she tried to seize his heartstrings and cling tightly. "Though I wouldn't mind...I guess my boyfr...ex boyfriend won't be coming anyway."

The young man nodded and sat down, setting his book down on the seat beside him and maintaining his sad expression. "I've never seen you from around here...are the two of you from out of town?"

Blanca ran her index finger along the glass, wiping away the condensation and holding her wrist as daintily as possible. "I am and so is he, though he seems rather cozy here now with some local...I came all this way to attend the opera by myself."

"That sounds awful!" the young man replied, focusing his attention on her in a way that felt rather flattering.

"Well...that's life, I guess. I gave my trust to the wrong man...now I'm stuck here with these tickets that I don't know what to do with." She took the time to pout before looking up at him with puppy dog eyes. "I take it that you're from around here?"

A measure of ego that was innocent enough not to be annoying washed over the young man's features. "Ricard Frommer, one of three heirs to the shipping company of the same name," he replied while reaching to shake her hand. "I was born here in the upper city..."

"Blanca," she replied, using her alias since this would be the only job where she was know by that name anyway.

"Blanca...that's such a beautiful name," he said, adding the complement in slickly enough such that it almost came off as a usual part of the conversation.

She didn't have to fake the flush that made its mark on her cheeks. Ricard was handsome, polite, well dressed and totally new to her. Plus, the fact that she was essentially deceiving and toying with him thrilled her; she could almost feel a slight pang of dizziness coming on despite the fact that she was sitting down.

"Why, thank you, Ricard," she replied, suddenly finding that she'd batted her eyelashes at him without even intending to do so. The line between deception and legitimate flirtation blurred until the conflict fell from her conscious mind, forgotten and ignored. "If only there were more good men out there who actually cared enough to empathize with a person who's been wronged."

The pure, unassuming smile he flashed her let her know that she'd hit the jackpot: young, well off, familiar with the upper city but hopelessly naïve. By the end of the morning, she'd already had him proactively offering to escort her to the opera, and even to show her to his family's villa afterward. After a few strategic head tilts and subtle nudging of his foot with hers beneath the table, he'd practically done her job for her.


	6. Chapter 6

Sharimara assisted Blanca with the finishing touches in the hotel room just as the sound of Ricard's arrival echoed in the street below. Not finishing touches on her outfit or hair, of course; living most of her life on the move from job to job, Sharimara knew very little about getting dressed up. What the warden and bounty huntress provided to the young woman, however, was a decent review of the plan for the night.

"Mingle as if everything were normal for the first hour or so," Sharimara explained while Blanca brushed her hair. "Dance, eat some appetizers, talk about polo or whatever those people are interested in. Once the clock strikes seven, just excuse yourself. Make sure none of the other women try to accompany you to the bathroom."

"Don't worry, I hate doing that even in my own real, non undercover life."

"Take your time on the third floor. Feel the situation out, watch for any roaming guards rather than stationary ones, look for closets where corpses can be stuffed. Don't opt for killing unless you can do so silently."

"Right. Basic stuff."

"Once you can get me inside, return to your escort. I'll wait for the show to actually start before I strike the killing blow. Once the king falls-"

"I find my way back to you, I got it Shari."

"Be sure that you do. The city as a whole will probably be utter chaos, and leaving Stormwind should be easy by ground. But getting out of the opera house itself will be tough; the city guards will probably put the place on lockdown in a futile attempt to conceal the news as long as possible."

"And I'm guessing you know that from experience?"

"Experience and logic. Every scheming faction will see this as their opportunity to strike, both at each other and at the remnants of Chalmers' supporters among the guards and the clergy. As long as we can escape from the immediate vicinity we'll be fine, so don't delay when you slip away from the crowd that will inevitably stampede to break out of the opera house."

A knock at the door prevented any further conversation. "Miss Mendoza, a certain Ricard Frommer has arrived for you," came the voice of the half elf concierge from the other side of the door.

"Thank you so much, I'll be right down!"

Once she adjusted the blue knee length skirt and the gold coat she'd brought for the last time, she turned to find Sharimara already near the window. "Remember: always be ready to improvise, think on your feet, but try to reach the basic goal no matter what," the older woman whispered while peering out the window into the garden out back. "I'll see you at seven."

"Likewise," Blanca replied before leaving the room and locking the door behind her.

While all of the hotels in the upper city were quite grandiose, the specific establishment Blanca had chosen was less flashy, further away from the center of the upper city and less likely to attract attention. She had a lonely walk downstairs and out of the lobby, which was just what she preferred. By the time she exited and saw the two horses pulling a stagecoach with Ricard seated inside, she'd steeled her nerve to become the fake, dumped noblewoman again who was appreciative of the company but not shocked by the splendor, which was supposedly normal for her.

She was shocked, however, and containing that wasn't entirely easy.

"Oh my...Ricard, this is marvelous," she said while accepting his helping hand to step inside.

He didn't seem to mind her reaction, nor did there appear to be arrogance in his smile. His family were, perhaps, nobles of a lower grade, or simply people who'd tried to teach their son some manners in spite of their material wealth. "Thanks, I'm glad you like it. I don't typically travel like this, but tonight is certainly a special night. They say King Isembard will actually address the audience before the show starts."

Breaking her focus away from the scent of Ricard's cologne, the dark red velvet of the interior and the pleasant clop of horse hooves outside was rather difficult. A part of Blanca tempted her to blow off the entire job, enjoy the evening and to even tempt him to spend a little more time inside the stagecoach after the show...

Focus you nitwit, she scolded herself mentally. "Ooh, I've never heard the king speak before. How will he address the people, though? Isn't security high at these sort of functions?"

Naïve and trusting to the point that he made her feel guilty, Ricard let out a warm, hearty chuckle. "Not necessary here. Remember, the security is mostly down near the portal; people who'd want to cause trouble generally won't make it inside of the opera house itself. King Isembard will simply speak from his personal balcony, which is at the top of the theatre next to the balconies of other notables." The sort of innocence that boys in Blanca's village lost before they were even twelve shone in the eyes of the early twentysomething man whose arm she was holding. "He's so humble, isn't he?"

"He...yes, I'm sure he sees himself as a man among equals," she begrudgingly conceded. A mental picture of Sharimara's piercing green eyes glowering at her helped her to remain focused. "We don't know much of the king out in Redridge, other than secondhand accounts. I always heard he travels with a retinue of at least eight royal guards."

Taking the bait, Ricard's eyes lit up when Blanca offered him the opportunity to 'teach' her about matters she didn't know. "Only five, actually; they're the most elite warriors from the Stormwind training ground who specialize in protection. They don't even get married because they're so devoted to their jobs."

Good to know. "Gosh, I couldn't imagine living one's entire life without ever getting married. I'm only th...twenty two and my family is already complaining to me."

"I know that feeling. I'll be twenty three in January and my stepmother is already pestering me about settling down. Probably so I just move out."

"Sounds like my stepmother," Blanca lied through her teeth. The expression Ricard made, akin to that of a person who felt nobody in the world had previously understood their ultra complicated life, erased much of the guilt she'd felt up until then.

Blanca didn't push her luck in terms of probing for information, however. The knowledge that Ricard possessed was likely minuscule anyway, so there was no reason in causing any sort of suspicion in the one person she was supposed to keep the closest to her after her partner.

Not that there was time to try. Only a few more minutes passed before the sound of many people passing by on foot echoed against the cobblestone outside; the clop of hooves other than those of the Frommer family's two horses indicated that they had arrived at some sort of dropoff point for attendees.

Metal boots scuffed on the ground as a footman approached. "Welcome to the Stormwind Opera," announced the guard from outside the stagecoach. "Please exit and make your way up the steps; we need to keep the line moving." The man promptly walked away to address what sounded like another horse drawn carriage behind them.

"Please, allow me," Ricard insisted as he exited first and then held out his hand for her to follow.

"You're too kind," Blanca replied while reminding herself to hold her usually stiff, strong wrists limper than usual to play the part of a future trophy wife.

As Ricard helped her down onto the street in front of the high steps leading up to the opera house, she scanned the area as a matter of habit. High steps numbering at least fifty led up to the structure itself, and numerous wealthy guests laughed and chatted in groups as they ascended. Security didn't appear particularly high, though the armored guards were swift in dissuading any of the attendees from stopping to talk on the steps rather than entering the opera house itself. The sun had begun to set, and down on the street level, Blanca found it impossible to look beyond the tall buildings of the upper city to see the squalor of the lower city below. For young people such as Ricard who'd never left the upper city and thus knew nothing of the reality lived by the overwhelming majority of Stormwind's denizens, it was almost understandable that they'd be ignorant of the truth.

There was no time to ruminate on the splendid surroundings, however; soon enough, a footman ushered the two of them up the steps as well, and Blanca handed Ricard their tickets. Unlike the tense and militaristic roadblock checkpoints she'd faced in the lower city, the opera house featured a series of simple ticket booths that were fast, efficient and featured almost friendly attendants inside. Entry to the building was so smooth and calming that in that moment, Blanca almost forgot that she was in the fabled metropolis known as a place of sharp class divisions and widespread civil unrest.

When she walked inside the atrium of the opera house, however, she received a painfully clear reminder...and her anger was immediately stoked again.

All around her, the opulence was so over the top that it almost seemed like the joke of a rich madman rather than a serious attempt at decor. Marble columns rose two floors up to the ceiling of the atrium, wrapped in vines and the nests of songbirds imported from the Jade Forest. A real pearl the size of a watermelon floated above an arcane plinth in the center of a colored fountain, while solid gold rimmed every single mirror, picture frame and doorway in the crowded atrium nearly the size of a ballroom.

As if all of that wasn't enough, the sheer amount of snacks for only enough people to fill a simple theatre was appalling. The wine flowed like water and in different flavors, mixed with the juices of fruit only found in the Un'goro Crater and freshly squeezed by laborers whose only job was to run around juicing fruit while separate servants carried the fruit, and another set then offered the drinks to guests. Butlers wearing uniforms more expensive than Blanca's dress carried platters of caviar, tauren flesh and all different kinds of cheese, and pairs of child laborers carried around garbage cans so the wealthy guests could throw away their food after eating half of each item and then losing interest.

Only Ricard's naïve calmness and his deep yet soft voice brought her back to the present and away from her moral outrage.

"Isn't it amazing? We only had to pay for tickets and the Stormwind Theatrical Society footed the bill for all the wining and dining." Blanca locked arms with him as they talked and walked, working hard to prevent herself from speaking out of character in the middle of what might as well have been hostile territory. "You know, I hear the royal family is one of the primary patrons. My father always told me the House of Chalmers was generous but I had no idea."

Biting her tongue, Blanca considered each of her words as the two of them wove their way into the crowd of cheese eating snobs. "Is your father a member of the society?" she asked, trying to keep her tone as wondrous and awestruck as possible.

"No, not quite," he replied, appearing sheepish for the first time. "Frommer is a more modest house...we own a few small businesses that filled in the gaps left by the loss of the Wetlands and Loch Modan during our war with the dwarves - you know that one that occurred maybe two decades before we were born?"

"My family's...uh...history tutor taught me about it."

Ricard's eyes lit up. "Oh, your family gave you tutors? You really are so lucky. Sometimes I feel like we're the only nobles here who can't afford them for all subjects."

As blue in the mood Ricard looked after his confession, Blanca actually felt hers improve markedly. Not only was he a relatively kind person compared to what she'd believed about nobility previously, but he was also trusting enough to admit a shortcoming in his family's financial history that would normally lead to his ostracization in front of the type of person she'd deceived him into thinking she was. It was endearing in a way, considering he'd only met her that morning. His honesty was cute, and she had to bite back on that familiar sense of guilt over the way she was - technically - manipulating the young man.

She looked at the gold plated mechanical clock on the wall; there were still forty five minutes remaining before she'd need to rendezvous with Sharimara. The least she could do while waiting was show him a good time.

Squeezing his arm, she pulled him away from a long table featuring different varieties of salted murloc flesh toward a circle of other guests who'd had a little too much to drink. "Ricard, do you know how to dance?" she asked, nervousness already building up inside of her. Her only experience dancing had been what she'd learned from her very distant orc cousins, and that style would most certainly not be appreciated in a setting such as the opera house.

Still, it might be her only chance in a long time depending on where life took her in the future, plus it seemed like a good way to prevent Ricard from possibly asking any personal questions about her; there was little else to do during the forty five minute wait.

Nervousness shone in his eyes as well, both thrilling and relaxing her in a logically contradictory way that tickled her spine. Thrilling her because she realized her offer had caught him off guard, and relaxing her because she realized she wouldn't have to worry about embarrassing herself if he was already nervous, too.

"Not too well. But we can certainly try!"

Reminding herself at the last minute to offer her hand instead of dragging him out there proactively, Blanca allowed him to lead her, however much more nervous he was. The fact that he made no secret of watching a couple across from them in the circle before mimicking their moves implied that he was nervous about the experience, but not about what the other people thought. It was as if he was either so innocent that he didn't realize others might joke about his novice dancing skills, or so nonchalant about it that he only worried about what Blanca thought of him, and no one else.

Once they joined the circle of at least two dozen other dancing couples, both of them loosened up considerably. More than a few others weren't terribly great dancers themselves, and the fact that nobody seemed to pay much mind to anybody else made laughing at their own mistakes together much easier. For those minutes when they were dancing, she was able to forget about all the material waste around her as well as the fact that she was about to help spark a violent revolution, and all that existed was the way Ricard's delt felt beneath his Stormwind tabard and how not annoying she found it when they kept stepping on each other's feet by accident.

For the whole duration of the dance, Ricard behaved like a perfect gentleman. His gaze never slipped below her neck, not did his hand slip below her shoulder blades...much to her chagrin. Although Blanca still had to play the part of a refined noblewoman, she was most certainly not a 'lady' in reality, nor was she even remotely interested in becoming one. More than once, she tried to shift positions and bait him into sliding his hand down lower, and when he corrected his grip to avoid doing so it just made her laugh even more. Fiery fantasies about whether or not she'd have enough time to lure him into a broom closet before the show started were doused when the clock struck seven and began to ding.

Most of the nobles didn't take notice; the king wasn't set to begin his opening address for another hour, and there was no rush for them to finish sloshing around all the fermented drinks and endangered animal meat. Blanca, however, experienced a miniature heart attack when she realized she was late. For a meeting with Sharimara.

"Ricard!" she gasped, the mischevious side of her still pushing her to speak with her lips right against his ear despite her state of panic. "That wine has run through me!"

After a shuddering breath in reaction, he pulled back, but gripped her a little more tightly to him. "There's a restroom up on the second floor, which will likely be less crowded than the one down here," he replied while pointing toward a hallway which she assumed ended in a stairwell. Leaning a little bit closer, his eyes held that sort of excitable yet unhidden gleam that only a young man who really didn't possess much experience with the world could display. "Do you...do you want me to go with you?" he whispered, nervous excitement written all over his face.

Fuck yeah, she thought to herself. "Oh, sweetie...I mean I really, actually need to go to the bathroom," she replied, this time not needing to fake her tone when nearly apologized for it.

A self deprecating smile indicated that he took it in a stride. "Ah, sorry," he chucked to himself.

"No, I'm sorry." Why would you say that out loud you idiot! "Don't worry...I'll just take a few minutes," she said while the two of them slowed down and worked their way to the edge of the mingling crowd.

"Alright. I think I see some people I know over by the molten chocolate fountain. I'll be right there, and maybe you could get to know some other locals when you get back."

"I'd love to!" she chirped as she forced herself to break away, her good sense winning that specific battle.

Even the half circular hallway he'd pointed out to her was a bit crowded; various groups of nobles chatting about the new sweatshops they'd opened or how much money their textile factories had saved by laying off a few dozen 'ruffians' in the lower city crowded the way. Toward the end they thinned out a bit, giving way to a hand carved marble floor covered in discarded paper waste. The stairwell at the end was guarded by two very bored city guards; one of them had already moved to block her path when she was ten paces away.

"Sorry ma'am, but only VIPs are allowed upstairs," the man said apologetically.

Not having any patience to wait nor the bravery to force her partner to wait, she threw down her trump card immediately and without escalation. "Im riding the crimson tide and the handicapped stalls are occupied in all the bathrooms in this floor!" she exclaimed.

The second guard appeared a bit confused. "You mean, you need the whole entire handicapped stall to...?"

"Do not get us sued again!" the original guard who had blocked her hissed. "Sorry ma'am. Please make it quick, though."

"I promise, officer," she replied while hurrying up the stairs without a second word or thought.

Fortunately the stairwell was mostly empty, and the second floor itself consisted only of a single hallway due to the fact that both the atrium with the wine and food as well as the theatre itself were open to the ceiling. Down that hallway she could see that individual guards were standing around the doors to VIP rooms, and thankfully none of them noticed when she peeked out of the stairwell to check the general situation.

The third floor was darker, and even emptier. Eerie, even. The hallway opened up into further passages instead of closed off doors, and there didn't appear to be any guards roaming about. Red velvet similar to the material in the inside of the Frommer family stagecoach covered the floors and half of the walls, and the rust red wallpaper and ceiling paint added a decidedly decadent feel to the third floor. Creeping around, Blanca halfway expected to bump into a room full of prostitutes or drugs or something like that; the place couldn't have seemed more 'off' unless there were lava lamps lighting the halls instead of arcane crystals.

Muffled voices rang against the walls, and she could only assume that various royals were laughing and joking to themselves on the other side. The absence of security bothered her in a way she couldn't quite justify or explain.

Passing further passageways, she counted the number of halls leading toward the side of the building as she crept down the hallway. From the schematics of the building that she'd obtained from the black market, she'd learned that there was supposed to be a ladder leading to the fourth floor very soon; maybe just another two or three hallways down...

But the tap on her shoulder let her know that she wouldn't be able to open it just yet.

"Well well, look at what we have here," Farquhar growled from behind her.


	7. Chapter 7

Muffled voices continued to ring out from the other side of the walls, occasionally breaking out into laughter as various royals made jokes over drinks. The sounds of the wining and dining guests two floors below were long gone from Blanca's ability to hear, and the air was completely still outside that night. All was quiet, except for her interlocutor's smug snicker.

Slowly but surely, she turned around to face down Farquhar, recognizing him immediately for his caterpillar mustache and the unsightly beer gut. So confident was he that he hadn't even bothered to bring along other guards, nor had he bothered to wield his mace.

He sneered, looking down his nose at her; he was alone, but by the standards of their race was a rather large man. The way he took baby steps toward her with his shoulders tensed up high implied that he was used to pushing around civilians and bullying short people. "I knew the moment I saw you at the checkpoint outside the portal the other day that you would be trouble," he growled with much more hostility than simple trespassing should have warranted.

Realizing that there was plenty of hallway behind her in addition to less noise from the royals on the other side of the wall, she began to back up. "Officer, I was only looking for a handicapped stall that wasn't-"

"Save it," he growled again, his eyes shining with the sort of aggression that she normally saw men with too much testosterone display toward each other. There was no lust in his eyes; simply the desire to push other people around. "So...let's see what we have here. Breaking and entering..."

He shoved her hard, much in the way a child might shove another one at the playground. "Hey!" she helped, allowing herself to be knocked back and working hard to conceal the athleticism she actually possessed.

"...trespassing on royal grounds..."

"Don't touch me!" she helped again, strategically allowing her high heeled shoes to 'fall' off since she wouldn't have room to use the spring loaded mechanisms in the bottom at such a close distance.

"...attempted burglary of government property in the form of arcane lighting crystals..."

"You can't prove th - hey!"

"...yes, I think we have enough to put you away for at least the next five years, little girl." At that comment, she grit her teeth, legitimately angered by the belittlement. A haughty, entertained grin peeled across his crusty lips. "Oh...I'm sorry, did that bother you? Am I pissing you off?"

She continued to back up, passing at least four more hallways as she fell into her frightened little woman routine. He made no attempts to grab or even touch her aside from shoving her backward; by the time he stopped and appeared to have finished his little game, they'd approached what appeared to be a series of empty hallways without carpet; it was as if that dark corner of the third floor had been left incomplete and forgotten since the public never saw it.

He'd fallen right into the trap.

Measuring the level of his collar bone versus hers, she began to imagine that he was a training dummy. Due to his pot belly, he was actually in a better position than a more athletic man like Ricard; while the latter's center of gravity was high in his shoulders and chest like most males, Farquhar's was low in his stomach and hips, like most females. Knocking him over would be exceedingly difficult.

"Sir, if you'd just let me explain," she started, cutting herself off and giving him the best 'little girl' expression of bashful remorse she could.

Hook, line and sinker. "Explain? Baahaha!" Farquhar laughed, tossing his head back and flashing his molar teeth while balling up his fists on his hips.

He didn't even see the throat jab coming.

Wincing at the damage she'd caused to another living being for the first time, Blanca nearly faltered and apologized when she felt the cartilage in his Adam's apple split and crack under the force of her knuckles. A silent gag twisted on his face as he vomited blood, and she just barely ducked in time for the spout to miss her and stain a ripped up patch of red velvet carpet instead. Grabbing his throat and stumbling backward, he strained in a failed attempt to scream and instead caused his own face to redden like a bright, ripe tomato. Not wanting to give him the time to recuperate, Blanca sprang into action and grabbed the gold colored scarf she'd wrapped around her neck and tossed her handbag to the side.

Feeling the fine edge with her index finger and thumb, she found the side of the scarf the lining of which contained a secret, industrial strength chicken wire. Dashing despite there only being about five feet of space between them, she looped the scarf around his neck from the front, yanked him forward and swung herself around behind him, clinging to his back and pulling the scarf back as hard as she could against his trachea. He bent forward, nearly stumbling to the floor before he caught himself though she could hear him audibly strain some joint or another in his leg in order to remain upright. Twisting the extra folds of the scarf in her hands, she tightened the makeshift noise and garroted him as hard as she could, tucking her forehand against the back of his shoulder blades so as to avoid any potential backwards headbutts.

Blood and snot gurgled from his nose, and he scrabbled to grab ahold of her hands. Rearing up, he found the clarity of mind to turn with his back to the corner of the wall at the entry to another empty hallway and jumped backward. Air rushed through her wavy hair and her mind focused only on the image of her spine being slammed against that sharp edge. At the last second, she released her legs from where they'd been wrapped around his waist and flung them out behind her, balancing against the wall and pushing to the side.

The both tumbled to the floor, but it was in such an awkward and uneven way that their combined body weight didn't thud against the concrete so much as roll. Retaining her death grip on the deadly scarf, she flipped onto her knees while he was down on his back, pulling his entire head to the side and trapping one of his arms behind her own head in a grappling move that was literally and ironically known as a scarf hold. He raised one of his feet as if to stomp his boot against the floor, sending a wave of panic through her as she wrenched the muscles of her lower back and dug her knees into the concrete. Heaving with all of her might, she dragged his body back down one of the empty, unfinished, unlit hallways at the last moment and prevented the heel of his boot from connecting with the concrete solidly. The sound was weak and ineffective, as were his increasingly powerless movements. Her fingers went numb and her lips began to tingle as an inexplicable tear rolled out of her left eyeball, and she continued dragged him back further and further like a worm crawling backward until they reached a dusty corridor with literally no light at all and plenty of old furniture and coatracks in makeshift storage.

Only when she realized that she'd accidentally dragged him over to the access ladder to the fourth floor did he finally stop fighting.

For a few more precious seconds, she lied there on the concrete floor in the pitch black corridor, flinching at the throbbing pain in her back muscles and the odd sensation in her lips. Her nerves were shot as she waited, half expecting him to jump back up and call for help again, but such an event never came to pass; he was as dead as a doorknob in a dusty corridor that also had a few spare doorknobs strewn across the floor.

Rising to her feet, Blanca found her hands trembling. The continued laughter from the VIP rooms reassured her that nobody had heard the scuffle, but she just couldn't bring herself to calm down. Denial took over as she threw herself against the access ladder, pretending that the churning in her stomach didn't really exist. Step after step, she forced herself up the ladder and into what appeared to be an attic for stage props, nearly stumbling over the rafters as she honed in on the door to the rooftop that she and her partner had discussed the day before. The insides of Blanca's cheeks began to sweat as she hopped over to the door, having forgotten that she was still barefoot and without her handbag. By the time she unlocked the door and allowed Sharimara inside, the green eyed monster was about as livid as such an ancient being could possibly be.

"You're nearly twenty minutes late," Sharimara snapped before even greeting her young partner (and the sole reason she was able to enter the building safely at all). "What took you so-"

"Bleeeeecccchhh!"

No longer able to contain her nausea, Blanca spun away and vomited all over the rafters, expelling the few morsels of murloc meat she'd eaten before departing to the third floor. A sudden pleasant emptiness filled her stomach, though her temples and forearms began to sweat and her lower back muscles nearly cramped up.

Panting, reeling and relieved, she spit out the rest of the bile before standing up to meet Sharimara's gaze. She was rather surprised when the giantess was smiling at her warmly.

"Congratulations on your first kill," the older woman said while clapping her on both shoulders. "Don't worry, we all react that way when popping the murder cherry."

"Oh...oooh...oww...ouch...ohh...thank you," Blanca groaned, gladly accepting her partner's assistance walking back over toward the access ladder.

"You hid the body adequately, right?"

"Y-yes...in a pitch black corridor full of old furniture and door knobs."

"Excellent. Go wash your mouth in the bathroom and then take a sip of the strongest liquor available. We're behind schedule for our rendezvous, but still ahead of schedule for the big kill. All we need to do now is wait...when the king falls, you get your ass back up to the third floor. For sure we'll need to kill our way out of here; I can take out the royal guards in the immediate vicinity, but more are likely to come."

As Sharimara helped Blanca back over toward the access ladder, the young assassin - officially, now - noticed the new weapon sheathed on the warden's belt.

"Shari, you never fight with a sword."

The bottom half of the older woman's face was left uncovered by her helmet, and she grinned wide. "This is the blade of Lady Riordan, matron of one of the biggest noble houses in the city. They've been staunch supporters of the king; framing her for the man's assassination will be the perfect monkey wrench to throw into the works of all the various scheming factions."

"But how did you-"

"There's no time; I'll share the story of how our employer stole her family's greatest treasure if we both make it through this. Now, go. Your boy toy is waiting for you."

Calming herself down more easily than the mishap with the thieving parents the other day - Farquhar was an unsympathetic figure whom she didn't regret killing - Blanca grinned as she walked down the ladder. "By the Light, I could use a good break for the next half hour or so. Just to clear my mind."

"Don't forget to wash your mouth before you see him!"

Hurrying down the dark corridor, Blanca collected her high heels and her handbag. Instead of creeping like before, she dashed stealthily back toward the stairwell, carrying her shoes and jogging barefoot until she was sure she was in the clear. A quick stop at the second story bathroom near the stairwell allowed her to fix her hair and rinse out her mouth before she returned to the ground floor.

Neither one of the two guards at the bottom of the stairs said a word to her as she returned, likely wanting to pretend as if they'd never seen her go up there in the first place. Forcing herself to slow down, she took her time as she worked her way back into the crowd of gradually dispersing nobles in the central atrium of the building. As he'd promised, Ricard was still waiting by the fountain of molten chocolate with four of his friends, two couples that similarly bore the same sort of wealthy but not extremely so look of merchants who'd worked their way to the top rather than inherited it.

One stop to a table for shot glasses and Blanca had provided cover for the fact that she was drinking to help mask the scent of vomit on her breath. The first one was taken quicky at the table itself, while the second was carried alongside one for Ricard as she approached him and his friends.

"So this is the mystery lady from the east?" one of Ricard's two male friends asked rhetorically as she handed her escort a drink.

"Aw, Blanca, you didn't have to do that!" Ricard beamed while accepting the drink and putting his arm around her.

She leaned her head on his shoulder as the two of them drank, though her cover almost faltered again when a child laborer offered to take the empty glasses from them. Fighting off a frown, she forced herself to play it off but took the sight as a reminder of what she felt she was fighting for.

Not wanting to respond too strongly to the stranger's comment, she stood closer to Ricard while sizing up the four new people in front of her. "East meets west," she joked while holding on to Ricard's hand.

The woman who was in a similar position with that man, donning a red dress and bright red lipstick, peered at her curiously. "Ricard says you're from the Redridge Mountains...I'm from Redridge too!"

Blanca's eyes widened. Oooohh...shit. "Oh...that's nice-"

"So whereabouts is the House of Mendoza from?" the woman in red asked sincerely.

"Well...in the east," Blanca chortled, trying her best to give the other young woman the 'I don't want to talk about it' shrug. "Hey, is the seating filling up already?"

"I'm from the east, too!" replied the woman who just wouldn't get the point. "Northeast or southeast?"

Searching for any sort of lifeline, Blanca flipped through her mental filing cabinet of ways to dodge questions. "Geography...was never my subject. My parents always pushed me to learn alchemy - you know, transmutation of dirt into gold and all-"

"Ladies and gentlemen, seating has already begun," announced an attendant with a beehive the same length as her own head and neck. "Please don't delay - we need to seat all guests in an orderly fashion."

"Oh, look at the time!" Blanca gasped, almost turning woozy in the head as she pushed her heart from her throat back down into her chest. "We'd better get seated, I sure don't want to catch any grief from the security!"

The second of Ricard's too female friends pushed her playfully as if they knew each other. "Dont you worry about that, security is light. What you need to worry about is some freeloader trying to jump the rows and take your seat."

"I have some awful stories about that," her escort sighed heavily as the party of six began to follow the crowd filing in to the theatre.

Breathing her own sigh of relief, Blanca fanned herself off lightly. Ricard's friends thankfully lost interest in her once they realized that all of them were seated in different areas, and for once she wasn't offended by people ignoring her. A cone shape of guests formed as they all filed past the bottleneck that was one of four entrances into the main theatre. Unlike the middle and working class people in the lower city, most of the nobles tended to walk in an orderly fashion as if they had all the time in the world to spare. Even Blanca's latent anxiety over the grand escape she'd have to pull off was mitigated by the orderly and almost jovial wait caused by the unarmored, very civilian looking security at each of the doors.

Once inside, the splendor didn't stoke Blanca's anger the way the rest of the opera house and upper city had. The theatre wasn't quite as grand as she'd expected - the bottom floor where she and Ricard were to sit likely wouldn't have held more than three hundred people (the chairs were quite large and comfy) and the balconies on both the second and third floors wouldn't hold more than about a dozen noble and royal families on each side. The enormous silk drapes, the red carpet everywhere, the extensive arcane powered lighting...everything was merely a stage for the show she was helping to make. A calm before the storm settled in, and she found herself clutching Ricard's arm a bit more tightly and leaning her head on his shoulder at the thought that she'd very soon be abandoning the kind gentleman.

Instead of pushing the thoughts out immediately, she indulged herself for a few moments. He had been awfully kind...from his perspective, she truly had been a dumped woman on the rebound. Were that the case, she would have been someone relatively easy to take advantage of, and yet he didn't try; he truly did seem like a nice, naïve boy whose parents had raised him to think a bit more ethically than many of the other people his age (based on the conversations she'd overheard during her time in the upper city). When he patted her hand as if sensing her discomfort, she felt a warmth that reminded her of that of the more kind hearted village boys she'd been with, and all of a sudden the difference didn't seem that large. Perhaps there were good people everywhere, even among rich urbanites.

Just below the stage, the orchestra began to take their places. The finest musical instruments she'd ever seen dotted their area, and professional players wearing almost over the top colorful uniforms slowly took their seats and practiced. The maestro had already been out there - a rather sad pandaren man who appeared, from Blanca's vantage point, to be chained by his ankle to his conductor's podium. Once again, any sort of remorse for the series of events she was a part of melted away, and she stiffened her upper lip when an usher directed her and Ricard to their seats with a smile that she didn't return.

By the time Blanca and Ricard had waited their turns in line and been directed to their seats, it was almost eight o'clock. Where the time had gone, she had no idea, but she found controlling her heart rate a little bit more difficult to manage when seated. By accident, she reached for Ricard's hand while looking at the ornate balcony designated for the king and ended up squeezing her escort's thick quad instead of his hand.

"Hello!" he chortled shyly, immediately blushing and avoiding eye contact.

"Well, that's an interestingly happy accident!" she chortled right back, not knowing what else to say.

"Sorry for putting my leg where you thought my hand was."

She turned to see him, staring at his meekly downcast eyes. "Don't be sorry," she told him in a low voice.

She was flirting and she didn't even know why. Very soon she'd leave him high and dry, just like how he thought she'd been left when they met that very same morning. The period of time echoed in her head as he slowly tilted his chin up to lock eyes with her: that very same morning. They'd known each other for less than a day. As naïve as he was, she could feel that he wasn't actually infatuated with her. He was a grown man and knew that, at most, it was the first date in what could possibly have turned into a steady long term but unintense relationship were situations different.

Regardless, there was something about the way he stared into her eyes when he finally gathered up the courage to look back. A form of admiration that actually felt kind of pure; she almost felt bad for him for having bumped into her, and halfway wished she'd managed to land herself some rich asshole she wouldn't feel guilty over dumping at the end of the night. It was just one night, and he'd get over it for sure, but she knew from firsthand experience that having a person leave you never felt good.

He opened his mouth to speak. There wasn't a great apprehension in his demeanor, and she knew he wasn't going to say something monumental about the future or if he wanted to see her again. It simply seemed like the sort of hesitation a man experienced before giving a polite complement to a woman he didn't know that well yet.

"Blanca...you know-"

"Ladies and gentlemen," the woman with the gigantic beehive announced from the stage. Her voice was loud and grating, and it carried throughout the theatre. The entirety of the crowd quieted down without any ushering from the ushers, and the woman waited in a very stiff, refined, 'proper' posture until all eyes were on her. Sweeping her hands pretentiously, she draw an invisible arc that led up to the most ornate of the now fully occupied balconies.

"I present to you...King of the Alliance of Azeroth, Lord of the five continents and Outland, Nominal Commander of all five dragonflights, His Royal Excellent Highness and Viceregent of the Titans...Isembard! Chalmers!"

So loud was the applause that Blanca quite literally jumped in her chair, and for a second she clung to Ricard a little more tightly. Neither appearing forced nor natural, the audience almost seemed to overact and tried way too hard to display their appreciation for the monarch. Arcane magic hummed in the crystals lining the walls and a spotlight shone on a balding man wearing a frostsabre fur coat and a crown adorned with so many jewels that it appeared like a comically oversized party hat. Waving in a stiff, mechanical way, the king was flanked by two royal guards with their shields at the ready, paranoid eyes shifting around.

The clapping continued for far too long, and a woman in the audience even clutched her heart and wept while reaching out toward the balcony. It was an utterly ridiculous scene, though the way that the pandaren maestro pretended to drop his conducting wand so as to avoid clapping made Blanca smile. The way that a man who wasn't clapping enthusiastically enough was dragged out of a side door by the guards made her frown.

When King Chalmers raised both of his palms in a frantic, uncoordinated and spasmodic way, the crowd quieted down, and a few partisan hardliners in the audience angrily shushed at anyone who continued clapping for longer than the king wanted. Once he was sure that everyone was listening to him, the king began what had most likely been intended to be a rambling, long winded speech.

"Beobles, serbjercts, trersted certizerns, werlcerm to the Stermwernd Therter," King Chalmers began...speaking, it appeared, rather than simply blowing air through his lips or practicing his letter B pronunciation as Blanca had initially suspected. From the corner of her eye, she noticed Ricard wince at the tyrant's speech and mannerisms, and felt a small bit of victory when her escort's vision of the monarch was shattered.

"Ert es mer plerser to present to you all thers, the grerterst of all shows on the plernert. Fer ers is the grerterst of all nertions, in the grerterst of all termes, in the grerterst of all nertionerl healths."

Raising his hands slowly and robotically, the king cast a long silhouette as he held the odd position without moving. "Merner would have you berlerve that our nertion is in a state of dercline," he rambled, garnering a few hisses of disdain toward the well known fact that they all pretended was just a rumor. "But herrr, on thers night of all nights, we errr herrr to show those nerserers the turth of what this grert nertion is merd of."

Just as Blanca began to honestly consider shooting herself for the first time in her life, her ears were spared the great insult being heaped upon the Common language. Hanging over the king's longer silhouette by nearly three feet was a much sharper featured one. At the angle, Sharimara's long, batlike ears couldn't be seen since they pointed backward, though the vaguely feminine shape could be discerned. Thinking it to be a part of the show, the audience simply cooed at the effects, not even noticing when the two royal guards froze and spun around.

But the audience certainly noticed when the sword swept out from the curtain behind them, slicing both of their heads off and sending blood spurting all over the king's crown. By the time the first blood curdling screams started in the audience, all King Chalmers had found the time to do was turn around stupidly and stare his own death in the face. He didn't even react when the sword was plunged into his chest, cutting him clear in half and sending a fountain of blood all over three separate rows of guests below.

"Whoa," Ricard gasped, dumbstruck though not particularly outraged as the monarch he'd once praised fell to the floor of the balcony in several pieces.

"Yeah," Blanca replied just as all hell broke loose.


	8. Chapter 8

A fountain of blood spurted across the audience as King Chalmers fell in several pieces. As if to drive home the point of who was supposedly responsible, the gauntlet bearing the sword pushed it so far through that he weapon tumbled from its grip and onto the theatre floor below, narrowly missing a random civilian when it planted itself into the ground in a bizarre accident of physics that couldn't have been more perfect.

People screamed and cried. Some pulled at their own hair while others fainted, all of them mourning the man who for at least fifteen years had protected them from the majority of Stormwind's own citizens in the lower city beneath them. The sound was absolutely deafening, and Blanca and Ricard both held each other close for fear of what exactly their own unhinged compatriots there in the theatre might do.

One of the ushers stumbled over toward the sword in the floor in a dramatized, almost catatonic state. Dropping to his knees, the glassy eyed man gazed upon the murder weapon in sincere hurt, as if the sword itself had taken his beloved leader from him. Staring intently, there was a sudden hint of rage on his face.

"The family sword of Lady Riordan," he bellowed, though half the audience could no longer hear him. "The House of Riordan has betrayed King Chalmers!"

"Filth and lies!" screamed an enraged woman in one of the balconies that Blanca assumed was the noblewoman herself.

A few of the hardcore partisan supporters of the king began rabble rousing within the audience. "She's on the second floor; we must avenge the one true king of the universe!" a balding man with a really small upper lip yelled, gathering a group of five plus one guard to follow him through a side door.

Running back up to the stage, the announcer with a beehive hairdo that was as long as her own head and neck combined frantically tried to maintain order. "Guards, seal the doors! Do not allow news of the betrayal to reach the city until we know what's going on!" she yelled in her booming voice.

"No, you're wrong!" shouted who appeared to be one of Ricard's two male friends from four rows ahead. "The people have a right to know!"

"Yeah!" echoed a few more people in the crowd.

"No!" yelled a few weeping supporters of the king.

A shoving match ensued between the two sides, causing more panicked by standards to begin a mad dash for the doors. Earlier escapees had already begun to file out the moment the announcer gave the order to seal the doors, and a back and forth push and shove match between the audience on one side and the guards in the other side of the doors caused a near riot near all four exits. The noise was absolutely deafening, and Blanca could feel her heart pump in her chest as she searched for a way out.

Ricard pulled her close. "Blanca, we need to get out of here! This is going to get real ugly real fast!" he whispered urgently.

"I know!" she replied, scanning the room for which of the four exits appeared the most chaotic. "There, the doors on the far left side! They're about to blow!"

As she'd predicted, the tsunami of bodies throwing themselves desperately against the door caused the guards on the other side to slip on the marble tiles of the floor and fall down. Loud thuds rang out as their heads and bodies were likely banged hard when both doors flew entirely open and slammed against the walls with lethal force. The first few waves of people fell to the floor as well, and all the refinement and sophistication Blanca had seen from the upper classes of Stormwind disappeared. Trampling each other like herds of frightened zhevra, the rich all tried desperately to escape without even knowing why. Were they to be sealed inside the theatre after the assassination of the king, they'd most assuredly be safe; the culprit would obviously run away and any violence in the streets would pass them by. Logic was lost, however, and the cries of the first rows of people forming a living carpet for the successful escapees died out as most of the noise spilled into the central atrium and died out.

Tides of people rushed by them, jarring both Blanca and Ricard as all politeness was thrown out of the proverbial window. Reverting to her training and instincts, she swung outward with her elbow, knocking out cold a man even larger than Farquhar before he could plow right into them. Ricard's eyes grew as wide as saucers as he gazed upon her in awe, and a sort of realization seemed to dawn on him.

"Come on!" she shouted over the crowd, taking his hand in hers and leading him to jump over the rows of chairs like hurdles rather than fight three hundred people in the aisles.

"Yes ma'am!" he replied without a second thought as they rapidly jumped ahead of the line and reached the exit.

So many people from the audience had already escaped that the human tied had mostly died down. Slams rang out across the back wall as the other doors were forced open, and metal clanked against marble as even the armored guards found themselves unable to withstand the onslaught of the stampeding nobles. From the doorway, Blanca could see more armored guards regrouping at the verandah serving as the main entrance to the opera house, raising their shields and swinging their maces as they fought to contain news of the king's death for as long as they could. A sea of well dressed, terrified people confronted them, demanding and pleasing to be set free but to no avail.

Littering the doorway, many of the bodies that had been trampled during the initial push against the doors of the theatre proper were no longer moving. Stepping wisely, Blanca led Ricard through the door and among the overturned tables of food and wine. Two guests and one guard lied on the floor, completely drenched in molten chocolate that was so hot that their motionless bodies were actually steaming, as if to punctuate the utter chaos.

"Let us out! We have the right to freedom of movement!" yelled a woman in a pink dress who was literally wearing bells hanging on strings from her ponytail.

An armored guard wearing the baldric of a captain stared at her hard. "No, you don't!" he barked at her fiercely enough to send her cringing back. "You have as many rights as we allow you to have, now settle down!"

The entire atmosphere of the atrium began to shift. Even after only two days in the city, Blanca had witnessed the guards speaking to all the working class people in the lower city that way. When the rich people were dealt with in the same manner, however, the reaction was far more indignant.

An old man with a bejeweled cane slammed his walking aid on the ground, reminiscent of his working class counterpart from yesterday. "Who are you to dictate what rights we do or don't have? We're the ones who pay the exorbitant taxes around here!"

The captain stepped forward toward the elderly man aggressively. "I! Said! Back! Off!" he bellowed, shoving the old man over so hard that he stumbled.

Almost in slow motion, the senior citizen fell straight backward, hitting the ground before anyone could catch up and smacking the back of his head against the marble. Although he was still breathing, the crowd erupted in anger.

"The guards just killed an old guy!" one of Ricard's female friends screamed about thirty yards ahead of them in the middle of the crowd.

Though the nobles were much less hardy than the working class people in the lower city, they threw themselves at the guards with the same amount of gusto. Frail, spindly bodies slammed against the shields, and a few limbs cracked as the maces swung downward. Fear drove them to feats they would not normally have been capable of, and a group of noblewomen managed to drape one of the guards in a wine stained tablecloth long enough for him to be dragged into the middle of the sea of panicked guests and then beaten until he lied still, adding blood stains to those from red wine. Any sort of loyalty or understanding between the rich and the government was lost in a matter of seconds.

Ricard tried to pull Blanca close to him, though in her defensive mode she was so stiff that he actually wasn't able to and stepped closer next to her instead. "Blanca...I don't think we can go out through the front door-"

"The king has been killed!"

Half the eyes in the atrium looked upward to an open window about ten feet up the wall. One of the nobles had scaled a conjured ice sculpture and opened one of the windows, and was shouting the news to the street below the steps of the opera house. Pandemonium could already be heard coming from the outside, and Blanca surmised that a few of the nobles had escaped before the guard cordon blocked the exits and spread the word.

Soon enough, the news would spread like wildfire - urbanites were just as bad in terms of gossip, if not worse, than the sort of villagers Blanca herself was descended from. She could almost see the droves of criers and escaped guests running through the streets waking people in the villas, alerting the night owls and late night carousers to the news. The warring factions would be alerted, and all the theories her partner had previously told her about how they would all react would be tested.

"Noooo!" screamed some anonymous person in the crowd as a battered guard limping out of the theatre pulled out his bow.

He let an arrow fly, and it soared across the atrium until it pierced the back of the would be town crier's head and exited through his mouth. The force nudged him forward just enough that he fell outside to the street below instead of backward into the opera house, and the horrendous thump of his corpse hitting the asphalt was followed by screams from a side street next to the opera house. From what Blanca remembered, there was a modern art gallery on that side of the building, and at eight o'clock in the evening the place was likely still open; more people in the upper city would now realize what had happened, and the news would shoot through town at an even faster rate.

Before she could say anything, Ricard tugged at her hand again. "Blanca, the windows! We can break one of them open with a trash can and escape!"

He locked eyes with her, flashing an expression full of such hope that she almost faltered again, feeling the pull of excitement as images floated through her mind of the two of them running off together.

Such images simply weren't realistic, however. She didn't know him, he truly didn't know the real her at all, and she had no idea what he and his family would do now that the chain of events had begun. If she didn't rendezvous with Sharimara a final time to handle the final arrangements and the escape route her partner had planned, she'd be marked as a liability by their employers; she knew too much and would be killed as a possible narc. What's more, she actually did know Sharimara, unlike Ricard; she had to stand by the woman who had provided her with so much valuable training and advice in such a short period of time.

Pursing her lips and giving Ricard a contrite expression, she shook her head slightly and cupped one of his cheeks in her hand.

"You are truly...a wonderful, amazing person, Ric," she told him softly. All attention was focused on her, and the chaos of the amassed nobles as they finally pushed the armored guards over the edge of the steps suddenly didn't exist anymore. "I will always remember you, and the help you've given me...and I hope you'll always remember me."

Not so much hurt as confused, he cocked his eyebrow at her questioningly. "But...I don't understand," he murmured. "Where...where are you going?"

The guilt that had weighed down her shoulders for so long dragged her down; she couldn't bear it anymore. Casting the burden aside, she stepped a little closer to him and spoke honestly - if not directly - for the first time.

"Mortal life functions in cycles...nothing remains forever. Arcanists call it entropy: the theory that all systems in the universe, one way or another, eventually break down. And for far too long, the people of the lower city have seen their world break down. This," she said, indicating the fighting all around them, "is but a microcosm of that. A small analogy for the wider struggle that's been happening down there, where the bulk of the people live. Whether now or a year or two years from now, this system could not remain forever; not when it's been built on the backs of the poor."

Horses screeched outside at the same time that Lady Riordan did from inside of the theatre proper, the now deceased king's partisans likely having reached her and her entourage. A chant that was barely audible rang from the streets outside and bounced off the walls of every building in the vicinity of the opera house, demonstrating how much less loyalty the denizens of the wealthy upper city held for their government than the pillars of their nation in the lower city.

"I don't know what will become of everyone in the city now...I don't know exactly how events will unfold. But one way or another, the system that held the many down for the benefit of the few will fall...it will be up to the people after to seek guidance among those possessing a better nature." Sliding her fingers away from his jawline, she took a step away from him. "I truly hope you rise to be one of them, Ric."

The two of them looked into each other's eyes, a sort of realism passing between them. While he undoubtedly didn't comprehend the full breadth of her words, she could tell that the reality of what she'd done had begun to dawn on him. At first, hurt washed over his face, stinging her conscience as she bit her lower lip in sheepish guilt over having toyed with who she realized was truly a good young man. Hurt was washed away as a mixture of resignation, acceptance and even begrudging respect replaced each other in phases.

Ricard moved forward to take her hands in his, running his thumbs along hers. "What I saw from Chalmers tonight was enough to understand...my father always says that your first impression of a man, that gut instinct, is usually right." A final battle cry rang out from a defiant Lady Riordan as one of the king's partisans let out a death groan, but the collapsing balcony echoing into the atrium left the end of the conflict inside ambiguous. "I don't know how a girl from Redridge got mixed up in all this...but I know what my instinct told me about you this morning and even now."

He released her hands, giving her one last mushy look before he nodded to her. "Go. I'll cover you. And may the Light be with you, Blanca."

The two of them stood amid the crashing glass and screaming voices, smiling at each other one last time. The two of them began to step apart, and she was surprised by how easy it was to walk away when she'd previously feared that she might lose focus of the wider goal.

Except for one last thing she had to take care of.

Sprinting forward, she left logic aside if only for a few seconds as she ran to him. The air whipped in her hair as she approached, and for a few seconds she felt like she was flying. He met her halfway, needing no prompting as their lips crashed together for the first and last time ever. He wasn't exactly a phenomenal kisser considering his obvious lack of experience with women, but the feeling involved was enough. She might not have escaped the city just yet, but that one kiss alone was enough to make the night worth it.

Far too soon, they let go of each other, knowing that neither of them had much time. They both walked backwards as they parted ways, she toward the stairwell down the hall and he toward the only unbroken window he could escape through.

"Stay safe!" he shouted after her.

Logic left her again, this time in a less flattering manner. "I'm actually thirty six by the way, not twenty three!" she blurted out, her cheeks flushing slightly at the first totally honest thing she'd told him all day.

Eyes wide as saucers, he grinned wide just as they began to disappear from each other's sight around the half circle of the hallway. "You look freaking incredible!"

And with that, he disappeared from her sight and her life forever. She knew in their last moments that he'd wisened up a bit, and perhaps was a bit less naïve because of the experience. They didn't love each other after merely a day and weren't even infatuated with each other, but no matter where life took her, she knew he'd hold a special place in her heart. And as she whispered a silent prayer for fate to grant him all the best, she had a feeling that she'd hold a special place in his, too.

Turning and fleeing up the stairs, she broke into as fast of a sprint as her high heels would allow. This time, she didn't even bother checking the second floor as she sped up the stairs, desperately trying to reach her rendezvous point with Sharimara.

On the third floor, she could already tell her whirlwind of a partner had ripped through there. Blanca jogged down the hall, spying the bloodied corpses of a few more royal guards on the floor, their life essence staining the red velvet carpet an even darker shade. They were living beings, possibly with families, but Blanca's veins pounded so hard with adrenaline that she was overtaken by an objective survival instinct that she felt proud of herself over. This was subterfuge, this was assassination, this was war; a small, personal war she'd waged against 'the system,' albeit in a country to which she had no direct ties. Rounding the corner, she passed a dead prince with a sword in his hand and two regular guards who'd been decapitated; their heads were nowhere to be seen.

"Shari!" Blanca said in what she thought of as a very loud whisper as she caught sight of the warden's shadowmelded outline in a corner.

"Just in time!" Sharimara replied, breaking her shadowmeld and stepping out of the corner rather nonchalantly for someone who had just killed about a dozen people. "Don't congratulate yourself just yet, though; we didn't make it out of here yet."

The two of them turned and jogged together, passing more empty rooms in the rather wide hallway as they raced toward the access ladder. "We're practically out of here, though," Blanca huffed as they jogged. "What else could possibly...oh, God damn it!"

Jinx. When they rounded the last corner, a group of five black clad individuals were waiting for them; two humans wearing trench coats, a blood elf sorceress and two goblins wielding rifles.

"Well...look at who's trying to muscle in on our territory?" asked one of the identically smug looking male goblins as the group in black simply stood at the ready.

Blanca felt like the biggest idiot in the world...until a bomb exploded outside, shocking all seven of them as the floor shook beneath their feet.


	9. Chapter 9

**A/N: switching back to Sharimara's perspective here, for both this and the last chapter. Blanca was so much fun and had her time to shine, but this is still the bounty huntress' story.**

An explosion rang outside, shaking the walls and the very floor beneath everyone's feet. Though Sharimara was the only person who retained steady footing, even she was a bit shaken herself as the deceptively loud blast seemed to echo and bounce off of every single building in the entirety of the upper city. Alarm bells began to ring outside, signaling a state of emergency called by someone among the city guard. Dictatorships like these typically tried to keep such matters a secret from the populace for as long as possible, especially in situations such as clear assassination where it would be easy for the military to seize power. That even the grasping hands of the Stormwind garrison had been thrown up in the air was both a good and bad sign.

Good because the goal of creating a vacuum had been achieved. Bad because she and Blanca hadn't escaped the city yet.

The fact that they were faced with the Nightcrawlers, a tiny party of her competitors who had been gunning for her for at least a decade, only compounded the problems. Individually, she wouldn't have feared any of them; in a group, they were unholy terrors. Coordinated, focused, and entirely without honor, they were known for hanging up on targets and neutralizing them rather than engaging in fair fights. They aimed to win, and ideas such as duels and personal valor were as useless to them as the corpses lining the hallway.

If they were at the opera house, there could only be one reason: one of the warring factions had also wanted King Chalmers dead. And seeing as how she'd cut the tyrant into so many pieces that they wouldn't be able to even claim the bounty based on a lie, they had plenty of reason to be mad at her.

One of the two goblins stepped forward, appointing himself ambassador for the group. Though he held his rifle at ease, merely resting his hands on it, his little barracuda grin spoke of a great deal of malice. His leather jacket creaked as he slowly approached while staring her down.

"Can't say that I'm surprised to see you here, Hearthglen," the small man signed, legitimately tired and disappointed without the need to fake it.

Standing her ground, Sharimara checked on Blanca via her peripheral vision. The young woman didn't budge; she was either much braver than Sharimara had given her credit for, or much stupider. Or possibly both. The Nightcrawlers, for their part, held their ground save Mutt, the sharp toothed leader who was obviously feeling her out by closing the gap in between them. It was a risky move on his part; at a distance, he was an excellent sniper and held a clear advantage. That he so readily sacrificed that advantage in order to gloat signified a great deal of confidence. And possibly also stupidity.

"Your sentiment is reciprocated," she replied, trying hard to find the correct words in order to stall him. At times like those, she was especially regretful of the fact that she was poorly spoken; the more time she had to estimate every possible move they might make, the better for her.

The Sindorei sorceress snorted snidely, sneering and bearing her flat teeth at the target of their fury. Both Mutt and his twin - clone, according to some rumors - remained focused on her as well, the rhythm of all of their respiration audibly sped up despite their clear attempts at appearing calm and collected.

The two humans - a female and a male who looked like siblings but not twins - focused on their counterpart in the blue dress. Both wielding curved daggers, they might have lacked the formal training Blanca appeared to possess but had also racked up an astronomically higher kill count. Everyone stood tensely in a Sandfury standoff, each side poised to strike down the other.

Mutt ceased his approach, but his nervousness appeared to be more influenced by excitement than fear. "We had to take out two separate teams of our rivals just to get here; that old tyrant was public enemy number one. Lord Branson Johnson put out an open hit on Chalmers...whose going to claim it now?" Mutt asked, his tone almost complaining rather than openly hostile.

The sorceress began to weave the slightest of arcane spells in between her thin fingertips. That Sharimara could easily dispel virtually any hostile form of magic was well known in the underworld of bounty hunting; if the blood elf woman was even bothering to try, then it would almost certainly be a distraction while Mutt and his twin or clone or whatever filled her with bullets.

Sharimara's natural green eyes met the corrupted fel green of the sorceress. The skinny woman didn't back down; the group believed they had her. Duly noted.

"There are no winners in a game like this," Sharimara replied, controlling her voice so as not to growl at the group. Any show of aggression without action to back it up would only cause her to appear weak.

Mutt and his brother slash copy both tossed their heads back and laughed. "Oh please! You're here for a payoff like the rest of us," he cackled. Allowing his gaze to gradually relax again, the tiny sniper frowned and finally showed the true intent of his game. "We don't mind a little healthy competition; it keeps us on our toes. So here's the deal we're offering: you tell us where we can lift your paycheck in order to cover the costs of this mission, and we let you live. And the next time another dictator needs to be offed...may the best assassin win."

Confident to a fault, the two humans in trench coats continued to stare down Blanca without moving to attack her. Undaunted by their arrogance, Blanca continued to stare at them, and a small part of Sharimara tempted her to let the young woman be. In the back of her mind, a little voice told her to toss Blanca to the two wolves in human skin. If Blanca survived, then the violent ordeal would serve as the ultimate confidence booster for the young woman. If she died, then her unwitting sacrifice would distract the two other humans for long enough for Sharimara to deal with the blood elf and two goblins first, resulting in the end of the Nightcrawlers no matter what.

But...she couldn't. She wouldn't.

To abandon Blanca would have been the logical choice to make. It would have been the easy choice to make. It would have been the safe choice to make. And in a way, to assume that Blanca required assistance was almost a form of disrespect to her heretofore more than adequate skills. But no matter how loudly that voice in the back of Sharimara's mind screeched at her, she couldn't bring herself to accept the notion of leaving this young woman to die. Yet it didn't make sense.

Blanca wouldn't be the first partner Sharimara had intentionally sacrificed in order to save her own hide. People like her weren't exactly known for loyalty or comeraderie; nobody trusted anybody in the world of contract killing.

Nobody except for Blanca. Blanca trusted her. And that burden clamped down on Sharimara's chest so tightly that she gave up.

Sharimara stared down Mutt, scowling fiercely enough that the little man pulled his lips into a thin, straight line. "Not a chance," she snarled.

The fight ensued in slow motion. In one fluid motion, she flung her fel glaive, sending the weapon straight at him. The double blades were so wide, and covered such a large radius, that a person of his diminutive stature would never be able to dodge. Closing his eyes slowly and breathing out like a true super villain, he accepted his end with more dignity than she'd given him credit for, refusing to panic or cower even when the sorceress jumped out of the way.

Before he'd even been sliced in half, Sharimara leapt across the other side of the hall. In midair, she could count the exact number of milliseconds as the sorceress cast a wild arcane blast right toward her, stumbling to the floor in the process. Striking out with one of her hands, Sharimara utilized as little of her mana as possible when dispelling the blast; if she survived, she'd need as much of her reserves as possible in order to blink over to the roof of the museum across the street outside. That meant a fight without her warden's spells.

But that single spell - or anti spell, to be more accurate - was enough to remind her of her own mortality. Distracted by the blast she'd dispelled, Sharimara was completely unprepared for the assault of the two humans she'd thrown herself in front of for her young partner's sake. Her fel glaive flew through Mutt as if he was a pile of butter and embedded itself in the wall behind him at the same time that the two humans plus Mutt's copy struck.

The curved blades swung at her from two directions in about the same millisecond that she dispelled the arcane blast. The female swung a curved dagger upward at Sharimara's waistline while the male swung one downward toward her neckline. The soft plink of the Mutt copy's silenced rifle broke the air as the higher dagger came down, narrowly missing Sharimara's neck but cutting a hole into the tiny gap between her chestpiece and back piece with surgical precision. The blade cut deep, piercing her trapezius muscle and pulling her entire body down toward the floor despite the fact that she was probably twice the human's body weight.

The lower dagger, swung by the female, cut upward at Sharimara's belt, fitting perfectly into the gap in between her moon blessed metal girdle and the very bottom edge of her chest piece. Despite the swing's deadly accuracy, the female human hadn't accounted for the force with which the goblin's gunblast would knock Sharimara back, and the second dagger merely cut open a long gash right beneath the bottom of her chestpiece.

The hollow tipped, armor piercing bullet jarred her the most. Because her arm was still raised from having dispelled the arcane blast, her forearm absorbed the shot. Punching a hole straight through the top of her bracer, the bullet bored another hole into her flesh and grazed her tibia roughly enough to create a hairline fracture. The other side of her bracer stopped the bullet after it had lost most of its momentum from the first side and her muscles, but the damage was done.

Crying out in pain for the first time in a very long time, Sharimara fell, losing her footing as the female human dropped the lower dagger and simply scooped up the eight foot tall warden's long legs. Tumbling shoulders first, Sharimara found herself pinned to the ground as the female began dragging her by the legs while the male plunged his dagger even deeper into the meat of her trapezius muscle. Mutt's copy started to reload another shot in his sniper rifle, and a second arcane hum rang out.

This was it...the end. Across two hundred and twenty six years of life on Azeroth, Sharimara had never met an individual who could prove to be her match; the Nightcrawlers, however, proved to function with the efficient teamwork to achieve what demons, dragons, zombies and sea serpents had all proved unable to.

The shink of a metal blade emerging from a case sliced and diced all such lamentations to pieces.

"Hurk!" the male human groaned as his head suddenly lulled forward. He released his grip on the dagger stuck in Sharimara's shoulder and slumped to the side, clutching the back of his own neck with bloodied hands.

Twirling like a mathematical compass, what appeared to be a royal blue and caramel colored, upside down letter Y spun up in the air before coming down to the floor again. The two legs of the humanoid letter Y stabbed down onto the right arm of the sorceress and the left arm of the sniper, causing them both to scream and stumble backward (in the sorceress' case, for the second time). The rifle hit the floor and accidentally fired off a shot at the wall, breaking a hole in the drywall at the same time that a respectively pink and green pair of severed hands fell to the floor.

Another metallic shink echoed as Blanca landed seamlessly on both high heeled shoes, breaking into a fighting stance and looking mighty fine in her outfit while doing so. The female human dove for the discarded dagger, meeting Blanca's backward flying hand in the process. Having pulled her lipstick from her handbag, Blanca pressed a button on the base that sent the stylish blue substance flying off as a two foot long hollow arcanite rod folded out. The hollow rod echoed off of the other human female's wrist, not breaking the bone but knocking the limb away long enough for Blanca's leg to fly out again.

This time, the sharp blade hidden in the four inch heel of her shoe didn't extend until the last moment, stabbing into the enemy assassin's sternum and piercing into the Nightcrawler's lungs. Slapping in vain at Blanca's leg, the enemy human female rolled into the ground gasping for breath long enough for Sharimara to kick the dagger away.

Pain ripped through Sharimara's midriff due to her kick, but the way it jolted her entire body provided her with a view of why the male human had failed to find his dagger again. When initially charging the group, Blanca had sliced the back of his neck with her high heel knives, severing the tendons and preventing him from raising his head to look around. Not wanting to give him the chance to continue searching, Sharimara reached out toward him - each index finger of her gauntlets bore a razor sharp talon, as did the big toe of her ninja boots - and severed his jugular.

As the two enemy humans lie bleeding out on the carpet, one last arcane charge hummed in the air. Leaving the one handed goblin to fumble ineffectively with his rifle, Blanca rushed the blood elf sorceress one last time.

The assault that followed displayed a brutality that Sharimara hadn't realized her young partner was capable of. Swinging with the hollow rod in one hand and twisting the Sindorei's one good arm with the other, Blanca dispensed a beat down that was as slow as it was fatal. It was as if the attack on Sharimara had awoken something in the young woman, and she fought like a grown up child defending one of her parents or vice versa. Screams from the corrupted elf pierced the air in the hallway before gradually dying out into gibberish due to brain damage, and the caster's thrashing limbs eventually settled down into a twitch. Blanca displayed no glee nor pleasure in the violence, silently dispatching her opponent while a noticeable tear of anger dropped from one of her eyes.

By the time the blood elf's limp corpse hit the floor, the twin brother or possible clone of Mutt had given up trying to handle a rifle with only one hand, opting instead to wrap his gushing, bloody stump in the fabric of his shirt and beg for his life.

"You win! You win! You win! We'll-"

"Shut!" Blanca screamed, her voice almost cracking due to the emotion. "Up!" she screamed again as she snapped his neck.

Blood in the carpet. Blood on the wallpaper. Blood on the corpses. Blood on a nearby door. Blood even on the ceiling. And blood all over Blanca's hands.

Trembling and shivering, the young woman appeared to be in some sort of a trance as she stared into her own red stained palms. Her jaw hung open as if she'd been told her entire family had died, and her expression was beyond what could have been described as shock. Both of the two survivors of the assault panted together, the sounds of screams and chants from the streets outside the only sign that the world existed outside of that hallway.

A second explosion rang out, so far away that it was likely in the lower city but loud enough to elicit a sharp gasp from the young human.

"Blanca...you did good," Sharimara panted, feeling sharp pains in her shoulder and midriff as she spoke.

Snapping her head to the side, Blanca swayed for a moment as if she'd faint. "Shari...Shari!" she cried, falling to her knees on the carpet and frantically dumping out all the contents of her handbag.

A few more concealed weapons, a pocket watch, a pen, two lock picks and a hand grenade all scattered across the floor until the young woman recovered a tiny, compact first aid kit. Tossing the bag aside, she ripped the kit open and began pulling out medical supplies as if Sharimara would die at any moment.

"Slow down...it's okay. I inherited...half of my dad's regeneration," the warden gasped while allowing herself to be fawned over by her partner.

"Hold still!" Blanca ordered while pulling up the warden's chestpiece and applying disinfectant to the gash. Half the chemical spilled into the carpet between all three wounds, but Blanca didn't seem to care. "Y-you're going to be okay, I promise!"

Minutes passed as chaos reigned outside. Shaky yet technically accurate hands guided Blanca as she padded each wound with gauze after cleaning it and then bandaged it all over. Closing and latching Sharimara's armor tight, Blanca ensured that none of the wounds would split open again.

"You're okay...you're okay...okay...it's all okay," Blanca babbled as she clung to the downed warden once the emergency medical care was complete.

"Shh...you did good," Sharimara whispered, digging deep and pulling out a part of herself that had remained dormant and buried for at least a century. "But we don't have time. That woman in the trench coat was your size; exchange clothes and boots with her. Leave everything else behind except your fake ID."

"I...okay...it's all going to be okay," Blanca continued to ramble while following the directions.

Relaxing and resting up as much as she could, Sharimara remained on the floor and stared up at the ceiling while Blanca got dressed and scouted the rest of the area for any guards or other competing assassins. After a few minutes, the young woman returned and literally tried to cradle Sharimara's head while helping her to stand.

"That's unnecessary," she said in a stronger tone. The two of them stood next to each other and scanned the area again, and Blanca looked much quieter and more subdued than normal. "We're not finished until we're atop the book depository again. I left whatever was safe to bring from the motel in a bag on the roof, including our payment. Come on..."

"Yes...Warden Hearthglen," Blanca forced herself to reply formally, just barely maintaining her composure.

Walking slowly and breathing easily due to the pain, Sharimara took the lead despite being injured and even insisted on climbing up the access ladder first. Balancing in the rafters in the fourth floor was difficult, but the door to the rooftop was close enough such that they only needed a few seconds before escaping to the outside.

Sure enough, the bag of what Sharimara had collected was waiting on the roof behind an air vent where she'd hidden it. A disguise for each of them, more fake identification documents, regional maps and tools they'd need for travel...plus another thing. When she reached for it, Blanca squeaked and grabbed the bag first.

"You're hurt!" the young woman blurted out protectively.

Sharimara frowned. Humiliation was an extremely rare emotion within her psyche, and on those rare occasions where she felt it, she did not care for it one bit. There she was, a warden of over two hundred years of experience who had ended the lives of countless competitors before, most of them much worse enemies to make than Mutt. And there was Blanca, a greenhorn who had only killed another person for the first time less than an hour and a half ago and whose only experience in the cannibalistic world of bounty hunting was theoretical, in the form of training. And yet in the end, it was Blanca who had won that fight against the most dangerous fighting force in Khaz Modan; a woman whose achievements were literally half a percent of Sharimara's had shown her up and saved her ass yet didn't even gloat about it for one second.

Humility had never been Sharimara's strong point...how wrong she was to ever have doubted her younger counterpart.

"Alright...alright...it makes more sense for you to hold the bag," Sharimara conceded. "Because for this last part, I'm going to have to carry you."

She pointed to the arcane artifact museum named for that now extinct Proudemoore bloodline. Even as smoke and fire raged in the city below, there was still a clear view straight across to the top of that building.

Big, glassy eyes gazed up at her, and more than ever Sharimara experienced a flashback of a domestic life that had been torn away from her a hundred years ago. The blood in Blanca's hands didn't match the childlike concern in the young woman's eyes.

"Shari...are you sure you have the energy?"

Innocence aside, the question was resolutely embarrassing precisely because she couldn't honestly brush it aside. "I've cast my blink spell twice in a row a few times, but that was always over short gaps...to do this, I'll need to cast it three times in a row, to the maximum distance possible, and we'll lose altitude each time." Breathing deeply and looking out across the street, she shook her head. "We have no choice. If we stay here, either the guards find us while sweeping the building or we burn. We dive into the streets, we either get caught by the guards or mobbed by random rebels. It's now or never."

When she continued to stare at the top of the museum and then the next few adjacent rooftops beyond, Blanca held her hand. "I believe in you," the young woman whispered.

At that, Sharimara actually had to laugh out loud. "I'm supposed to be the one telling you that," she chortled, "not the other way around." Resignation to their fate and resolution to escape Stormwind or die trying pushed her to end the anticipation. "Come here. I'll hold on to you; you hold on to the bag. And I need to be leaning forward."

Stepping into Sharimara's arms, Blanca held on to her and faced in the same direction as if helping her to limp away from the aftermath of another skirmish. "Okay, Shari...I'm ready," the human said nervously.

Tension had no chance to mount; experience had taught Sharimara never to longer for longer than was necessary. Focusing the considerable remainder of her mana pool, she pinpointed the spot in the air that would be her blink spell's maximum extent and teleported.


	10. Chapter 10

**A/N: before you start reading, go to YouTube and find a video with a title along the lines of "Demon's Crest OST - The Hell of Civil War." That game's entire soundtrack has Sharimara written all over it, but that two minute song in particular fits the end of this story and the point she's fallen to so well. Hit play once she's alone again and then read on.**

Sharimara cast her blink spell while clinging to Blanca, teleporting both of them a few dozen yards out from the lower rooftop of the opera house. One second, both of her feet had been on the ground; the next second, she was airborne with that familiar tingling feeling inside as gravity began to drag her down. Three floors below them, a concrete avenue stared up at them, promising a painful fall were she to fail in her attempt to bridge the gap.

There was no time to wait. The very instant that she felt herself move an inch downward, she forced a second blink spell, forfeiting a large portion of her mana reserves as she pushed her spell to the limit and teleported herself to the absolute furthest extent that was capable to her. This time, the transition wasn't particularly difficult since they were already airborne, and the tingling sensation of being dragged downward didn't increase or decrease.

What did increase dramatically was the sting of manaburn. A warden was primarily an armored stealth class; not a caster type. They all possessed magic, but only for the sake of utility, such as teleportation behind walls and immunity to status effects. Consequently, their mana pool was as limited as that of other hybrid classes, and they could only use their magical abilities so many times before exhausting themselves.

There was only half a second for Sharimara to scan the area in front of her before mild panic set in at gravity's effect. She'd cleared well over half the distance between the opera house and the museum, but had also expent well over half of her mana pool in doing so. Reaching deep down inside, she spat up want little mana she had left, put her faith in the goddess above that she knew she didn't pray to often enough, and teleported one more time.

"Look out!" Blanca cried as, to Sharimara's initial relief and then panic, they'd overshot by about a yard and we're approaching the rooftop too fast.

"Argh!" they both cried out in unison as they hit the rooftop hard, rolling into a heap and disorienting themselves when the tingling sensation of falling ended to abruptly.

Gasping, panting and huffing, Blanca managed to stand up first, only increasing Sharimara's embarrassment. "We made it!" she chirped while offering to help Sharimara up again.

Her pride too wounded to accept help another time, Sharimara handed her fel glaive to the young woman instead. "We aren't finished yet. Come on, the book depository is only three rooftops over, and they're all small leaps. Not until we reach there can we truly rest."

Enthusiastic to finally be away from the blasted opera house, Blanca strapped the duffel bag to her back and gripped the double bladed glaive tightly despite the fact that the distinctive troll weapon looked ridiculously oversized in her hands. With a running start, the two women jumped across the first gap, then the second, and then the third, landing on the roof of the lonely book depository building hard. Finally having regained her bearings after walking (or blinking, in this case) off the pain, Sharimara landed more comfortably that time, though she still sat down to rest her weary body after the job was finally done.

Blanca, on the other hand, was unable to rest even after dropping the bag and the glaive next to the warden. "Shari...by the Light...what have we done?"

All around them was fire. Towering at least ten feet above the burning buildings at some points, the flames ate upthe structures that once formed the most populous city in the world. The lower city - the original Stormwind according to history books - was rocked by two more explosions, including one that destroyed most of the port. Small ant like dots crowded the streets as the commoners revolted, rioting and destroying their own city once the vacuum of power presented itself. At least one watchtower collapsed, met by the raucous cheers that reached Sharimara's sensitive ears even from below the plateau.

The upper city fared no better. At some point after news of Chalmers' death reached the lower city, the working poor must have breached security at the portal; the stampeding nobles from the opera house scattered all over the streets of the upper city as commoners wearing rags and tattered brown cloths chased them all over. Pouring into the streets in a way that only the people of the world's largest city could, they marched up every street hurling firebombs and glass bottles as the shops and mansions of the rich were destroyed. Powerless to stop the madness, the city guards tore off their armor and tabards and fled into the crowds in an attempt to blend in, displaying as little loyalty as any other class of citizens once the battle appeared to have been lost. At least one unit of armored footmen tried to maintain order outside the new royal palace, quickly disappearing beneath a sea of brown rags as the lower classes who had infiltrated the upper city swarmed all over them and most assuredly beat them to death.

Several people wearing bright blue tabards hung from trees in the public park near the center of the upper city. Bright yellow paint had been plastered all over the side of a building reading 'death to dwarf collaborators,' an obvious epithet for the New True Blues whom the dwarves and gnomes had hoped would establish a puppet government for them to revive the Alliance. Smoke wafted up from the twin military compound dw of both Generals Marcus and Henderson, as Sharimara had predicted, and a group of protesting commoners as well as a few noble sympathizers broke into the estates of the Houses of Johnson, Linland and Tucker, signifying the end of any sort of real opposition or potential challengers for the newly vacant throne.

Blanca shook her head, remorse written all over her face. "It wasn't supposed to happen like this," she lamented, her voice contorted in distress.

Much more resigned but not wanting to leave her temporary - now former - protege in the dark, Sharimara watched the fires burn as she spoke. "It could only have unfolded like this," she replied.

"The people didn't have to do it this way...they could have used the opportunity to set up a real government, with a real legacy."

"Blanca...when has that ever happened? How often does a revolution actually live up to its ideals?"

When the young woman didn't reply, Sharimara continued, hoping to talk some sense into her.

"What you see here is the reality...this is revolution. This is what the sheeple do when they're given the opportunity to fill in the gap...chaos. All that talk about power to the people, and representation...it's garbage. Tyrants and dictators hold unruly populations in order, force them to follow rules, keep them in line. The successful revolutions are the ones where an even more brutal strongman takes over...some of them are just better than others at rewriting history.

"And so the chaos will ensue. Garbage won't be collected, water won't be pumped, streets won't be policed...the people's lives won't improve. That's real life. The people won't rule themselves properly because they aren't qualified or educated enough to do so. The rich will be dragged out into the streets and lynched, scaring away the business owners that are so vital to a city's economic life. Crime will increase, blood will be shed as despots arise from the ashes, and only the strong will survive. Then...after so many innocent lives have been lost...stability will return in the long term. The people will endure their new dictators for as long as is reasonable for mortal beings until civil unrest starts again. The cycle will start again. The suffering will arise again. The society will collapse again.

"And in the end...there are no winners. Just losers, and other losers who lose even more."

Gryphons screeched as they soared overhead, blotting out the stars as they left the various roosts and flight points throughout the city in droves. Frantic nobles and even a few middle class denizens clung to the flying mounts for dear life, doing all they could to escape the hell that was Stormwind. More than a few of them lost their balance and fell off of their mounts, screaming as they fell to their deaths in the streets below, abandoned by flying animals no more loyal to their riders than their riders were to their king.

The few remaining, undamaged ships sped out of the Port of Stormwind far, far off in the distance, carrying whoever could run fast enough escape. People dropped into the rough waters of the port itself as they desperately tried to board, some of them diving from the docks and missing as they tried to literally grab on to the railings on either sides of the ships. The hulls bashed together as every captain tried to ram his or her way out of the port, crushing to death those people who'd fallen into the water and creating easy targets for the armed peasants who'd stolen mortars from one of the various guard posts throughout the city. At least one ship sank right in the middle of the harbor after all the damage it had taken, families crying out at the injustice of it all as they were dragged down to the bottom after having been so close to the relative safety of the open seas.

Complete and utter defeat plastered itself across Blanca's face. "What was the point of it all, then?" she asked rhetorically.

"Money," Sharimara replied grimly. "That's what a contract killer does: we assassinate people for money. It's a job...just like any other."

Shaking her head in denial, Blanca hugged herself and looked statuesque in her remorse even as a bellowing wave of peasants swept over a howling crowd of terrified nobles. "It wasn't supposed to be like this...we were supposed to be fighting for something," she sighed. Her eyes were closed, and she almost appeared to be shutting down.

"There was no higher purpose, Blanca. Our employers paid us to kill the king in hopes that they could take his place and become the next tyrants. We were facilitating a swap of dictators; and we failed. Nothing more."

The still, cool air of the night occasionally burned a little bit hotter due to the heat of the fires that slowly spread across the city, causing an uproar even in areas that had, up until that point, remained untouched by the revolutionary fervor. As the two of them basked in the bright glow of the flames, Blanca slowly opened her eyes and cocked her eyebrows in confusion.

"We...failed?"

Her puzzled expression went unanswered for a few seconds as Sharimara tried to find the right words. If there was a time where she wished she could be better spoken for the sake of someone else, it was then.

"Yes. We failed. Because the final part of our mission was supposed to end on the top of that museum back there...not here."

Turning to face her fully, Blanca stared hard as if trying to figure out what Sharimara had meant. The warden, however, had developed an unsurprising talent for concealing her true feelings after two hundred years on the job.

"I don't understand, Shari."

Nodding slowly, the warden continued to focus on the pitched battles taking place in the streets below. "Well...we didn't complete the final part of the mission." Ever so slightly, Sharimara turned to face her young partner, if only with a tilt of her head. "The final part of the mission was you."

Silence passed between the two of them, deafening in its overbearing eeriness. Although Blanca continued to maintain her relaxed posture, she did hug herself a little bit more tightly. Fear shone in the young woman's eyes.

"W-what...what does that mean?"

Breathing deeply, the warden came clean. It was far too late for lies.

"Blanca...discretion is the single most significant part of an assassin's profession. We strike from the shadows; we act with impunity. And most importantly...we are untraceable."

Blanca gulped visibly, but said nothing as she visibly began to breathe even more rapidly.

"The more people who know about an assassination plot...the higher the chance of it being uncovered. The higher the chance of someone being caught or becoming a narc. The higher the risk, the liability. The best assassins are the ones who disappear after a job; the most useful ones are those who can be assassinated themselves when they unwittingly show up to collect their pay from their employer. The young, the uninitiated, the unproven...no matter how promising their future potential is, they're all on the chopping block. They're all considered expendable. That's the heartless truth about a heartless profession."

Blanca began to back up, visibly shaking again like she'd done when she'd been afraid that her temporary mentor's life was in danger. "Shari..." she whimpered while staring down at her feet.

"I'm not the best at what I do, but I'm one of the greats. Unfortunately, an eight foot tall half troll with glowing half elf eyes is...far, far too conspicuous for a city like Stormwind. I could not have attended the opera as a guest. I could not have bought tickets on my own. I could not have entered the building without somebody on the inside to provide distractions. I could not have gained access to the portal between the upper and lower cities. In fact...I couldn't have even rented a motel room without sending up red flags to every guard in the area. Our employer knew that I could kill the king...but I needed someone to open the door."

"Me..."

"A human, or at least predominantly human crossbreed. Someone competent enough not to get killed or spotted, but not experienced enough to know what was going on. Someone with a background noble enough to be allowed freedom of movement in the upper city, but not so noble that she'd be recognized as an outsider. And then...once that person was no longer needed for the mission...the liability was to be ended."

Crestfallen and emotionally wounded, Blanca grimaced as if she was about to cry. Betrayal and abandonment radiated from her like magic, and she looked like she was too depressed to even blink.

Until Sharimara stood up and intercepted her in one fell swoop.

Blanca did not scream; she did not beg; she did not even try to negotiate. Saucer like eyes looked up at Sharimara, the hurt and sadness welling up as the young woman's heroine revealed a second face. Trembling but not pulling away, Blanca merely waited for the killing blow from a person she'd but so much faith and trust in.

Thus, when Sharimara smoothed the young woman's hair down as if she were a child, Blanca seemed confused beyond all belief.

"Blanca...our employer was Lady Riordan."

Nearly a minute passed before the revelation fully registered in the young woman's mind. "She...wha...the noblewoman you framed?"

If the look of betrayal on Blanca's face had destroyed Sharimara inside, the look of relief that followed it made the elaborate ruse all worthwhile.

"Yes...I took her family's sword, which they'd stolen from the House of Chalmers five generations ago, without her knowing. She made a fatal mistake in her eagerness to overpay for the best bounty huntress she could afford: she paid me in advance. And, like the monster that I am...I behaved as any true assassin would. If she survived the collapse of her balcony inside, she'll be dead before the morning anyway. I merely cut her already slim chances of survival in half...as I said...all these vying noble families become blind to the truth due to their lust for the throne.

"You would not have been the first partner I've betrayed and murdered at the end of a job, Blanca; I've bonded with people before you, on a deeper level, and performed my duty all the same. And the backplate of my armor has the knife marks to testify that I've been double crossed a fair number of times as well. That's the nature of this business; nobody trusts anybody. Those of us who survive for this long do so by backstabbing faster, harder and deeper than the others, and simply being more low down, dirty, rotten and lying that the others. We're the worst of the worst, and don't you ever forget that.

"So you see, Blanca...not awesome like you claimed. I'm not a badass; I'm just a bad person."

A cocktail of emotion bled out from Blanca's demeanor and body language, testifying to the complex mixture bubbling inside of the poor young woman. After a few minutes of unsuccessfully trying to speak, the young human relaxed her arms and truly did gain the expression of a child.

"I'm...honored...to be the first person you decided not to double cross," Blanca said, her voice still infected with the shuddering breath of her conflicting feelings. "I am the first...right?"

Sharimara smiled as warmly as was possible for such a moment. "That's correct...you're the only partner I was ordered to kill and didn't. And with our employer dead...you don't need to worry. Every single person connected to our work is gone. But that still leaves one more order of business..."

A measure of fear worked its way up to the surface of Blanca's body language again, though it was overpowered by the curiosity. "W-what's that?" she asked, her eyes widening again.

Running her fingers through the young woman's hair, Sharimara was able to pretend - just for those moments - that Blanca wasn't a full grown human, but rather a half troll, half elf child. Flashbacks of a failed domestic life long since passed stung Sharimara's heart in a bittersweet way, reminding her of the child that had been so unfairly taken away from her by fate.

"Blanca...you are strong. You are strong, intelligent, and capable of so much...but most of all: you have a clean heart. You killed in self defense, and took this job because you foolishly thought you'd be doing a good thing. You are a good person, Blanca...and you are not an assassin. That is why I must tell you, using the absolutely strongest voice possible to me..."

She pulled Blanca close, burning into her gaze and tightening her grip.

"Go home, Blanca. Go home! Use your skills for good...help people, become the heroine you wanted to be, take the box of jewels in that duffel bag that was my payment...take an indirect route and stay safe...but go home. If there's one thing I could ask of you as a friend, and a true comrade, it's that you go home and be with your family again before seeking further fortunes in the world...and you promise me..."

For a few seconds, Sharimara became emotional herself as her voice broke. Memories of the past were brushed aside, and she had to remind herself of the present, of the identity of the person in front of her, of the reality of the family life she'd lost a century before.

"...promise you that you will not ever hang around taverns and dens frequented by rogues again. This isn't you; you're not a hired killer. Stay far, far away from people like me, forever."

Though Blanca's eyes watered up, tears didn't stream down her cheeks. She did wipe her face, but retained her composure the entire time. After a few sniffles, she nodded her head. "I promise, Shari...I will never forget you, though."

Steeling her jaw even when smiling, Sharimara resigned herself to experiencing the melancholy internally instead of expressing it externally. "Nor will I ever forget you-"

"Miriam," the young woman replied with a grin. "Miriam Sheradon. I'll never go by the alias 'Blanca Mendoza' again."

"Miriam...that's a lovely name."

The two women smiled at each other, forgetting the screams and flames below. Without any prompting, the young woman whose true name was Miriam leaned forward and wrapped her arms around Sharimara's waist. The young (predominantly) human's head only reached up to the bottom of Sharimara's chest cavity, and for those few fleeting seconds she could feel the daughter she'd lost again, clinging to her for warmth and safety. A shuddering breath of her own climbed up her throat, and for once, she didn't feel embarrassed if another person heard it.

Not wanting to endanger the young woman, Sharimara was the first to pull away. "I'll need to keep that bag for my armor...if you don't mind-"

"I'll change here and dump this trench coat...there's a smaller handbag to keep the jewel box in, right?"

"Yes, the box, your compass...everything you'll need."

Without a word more, Miriam cast off the clothes she'd stolen from one of the Nightcrawlers and donned the middle class artisan's garb from inside of the duffle bag. In less than two minutes she was dressed and ready to leave, standing across from Sharimara on the rooftop and giving the older woman a wistful look.

"Goodbye, Shari..."

"Goodbye, Miriam..."

Stronger than her young age implied, Miriam easily turned and walked away, scaling down the side of the building and ostensibly rappelling down the side of the plateau as they'd done the day before. To say goodbye after such an adventure was likely difficult for someone so young, and yet Miriam displayed little difficulty in doing so.

Alone once again, Sharimara looked over the duffle bag to ensure that her travel tools, disguise and at least a portion of gold she'd stolen from Lady Riordan were still there. Feeling safe and stable, she removed her helmet and walked over to the edge of the building, shadowmelding for good measure as she observed the anarchy below.

The precaution wasn't needed; nobody was paying attention to her. Chants broke out among the throngs of rebellious commoners despite the late hour. Cheering and clapping, the lower classes of Stormwind celebrated their short lived victory and proceeded to tear down all the posters and images of both Isembard Chalmers as well as the lion symbol itself. Even in the upper city, there were no more nobles roaming the streets, and a few had even been bound and gagged in the public square where a makeshift executioner's block had been set up.

So much blood spilled from the guilty...perhaps even more blood spilled from the innocent. People would continue to die, and the squalor of the lower city would only increase in the absence of a functioning government that was likely to continue for at least a few weeks. All of the educated classes capable of actually running a city would either flee or be executed as part of a people's uprising, leaving only illiterate peasants to blame each other when their living standards continued to drop.

Her employer was dead...even her main competitors were dead, after having killed two other groups of competitors. With enough gold left to travel for a good while, Sharimara was free in a sense. She could escape that life; she could stop being an assassin.

But that would change the great evil she'd committed.

Sharimara had killed so many people without asking what they'd done. After so many decades spent as a regular bounty huntress, the allure of more lucrative kill contracts had won her over roughly half a century ago. But during that half century, she'd never overthrown an entire government by herself; she'd never caused anarchy for a city of several million people.

She was guilty; even if the system would have collapsed eventually, the chaos surrounding her had been caused by her own hand. Nothing would change that fact.

Looking up to the stars, Sharimara wondered if her parents could see her then. When they'd both died of old age only two years apart roughly two centuries ago, she'd only been a warden in training; she'd told them that she was going to catch criminals and stop bad people from harming the weak. And for a period of time, she'd done just that...but not anymore.

Would they be ashamed to see her? Would she feel too ashamed to look at them, if given the chance?

Too afraid to answer her own questions, she tore her gaze away from those stars, the bright lights that her mother's traditions taught were heroines and heroes who had died and joined their comrades in new constellations. At that moment, on that roof, thoughts of using her gold to run away and hide from the world, to hide from the memories of loved ones long since dead, had to wait.

Because as Sharimara watched the fires burn and the people scream, all she could wonder was how she'd ended up in that exact spot. How she'd ended up there...how she'd sunk so low. And how she'd allowed herself to become the monster that she was forced to admit she truly was.

Atop the upper city of Stormwind, a dark, pointy features figure carrying a duffle bag full of armor on her shoulder and a fel glaive in her hand watched an evil she'd created. The world continued turning, events continued unfolding, irrespective of her remorse as she ran off into the night. Perhaps after spending a few years on the move, living out of more inns and chasing down local quests, she'd be able to move on. But at that moment, all she could think of was running away and hiding from a world she only seemed to hurt.

**A/N: this is the ending. It is definitive, and it is the only ending I would want for the story. I'm not sorry.**

**Most fanfics have happy endings where there's a resolution to conflicts and a solution to problems; most of my stories are that way. But sometimes, a story that's a little bit more raw must be told. That's the truth.**

**Sharimara does hide away, and build up her walls again. Only when a certain person from her past enters her life again - a person very special to her - does she at least consider coming out of hiding. The next volume in her saga, "Reconnection," will begin in a week or two. For those who intend to continue, I can at least say that "The Collapse of Stormwind" is the lowest point in her seven volume saga, so you can breathe just a tiny bit easier; for those who only intend to read this story, I hope it elicited a reaction. That's a writer's job...and a mature writer understands that those reactions can't, and shouldn't, always be positive one hundred percent of the time.**


End file.
